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Authorised American Edition 

Reprinted from the 

Theological Translation Library 



What is Christianity ? 

Lectures Delivered in the University of Berlin 

during the Winter-Term 

1899-1900 



By 

Adolf Harnack 

Rector of, and Professor of Church History in, the University, and 
Member of the Royal Prussian Academy, Berlin 



Translated into English 
n Thomas Bailey Saunders 



New York 
G. P. Putnam's Sons 

London : Williams and Norgate 
1903 



37?/ zi 
no3 



Copyright, 1901 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

Set up, electrotyped, and printed December, 1901. 
Reprinted March, 1902. 



BY TRANSFER 



Ube ttnickerbocfeer press, Hew J^orfe 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH 
EDITION 

To meet the wiskes of my £ 
assented tothe publication of these Lectures in English 

i:tzt Ge r n - and as my est ^ ^ 

MrBaUey Saunders was so self-denying and obliging 
as to undertake the translation of them, I was sure 
of the, bej in the best hands. Whether thZTZ 
Zlt ' Z , m EnglaUd " *~ {S * ^manyfla 

° W - But thts T know : the theologians of 
n C ° Untry ° nly lMlf *«~* ** **£V tkey 
language of karmng and bury it in scholarly folios. 

A.HARNACK. 
Berlin, October, 1900. 



m 



TRANSLATORS PREFACE 

The following Lectures were delivered extempore to 
a class of some six hundred students drawn from all 
the Faculties in the University of Berlin. An enthusi- 
astic listener took them down in shorthand, and at 
the close surprised Professor Harnack with a complete 
report of what he had said. A few alterations 
sufficed to transform the Lectures into a book, and 
German readers everywhere zvere thus happily enabled 
to share in some of the privileges of the original 
audience. 

I deem it an honour to have any hand in offering to 
my fellow-countrymen a similar advantage. Goethe, 
writing in his last years to Carlyle, described trans- 
lators, in grandiloquent language, as the agents of 
intellectual commerce among the nations. The duty 
of such agency in regard to the contents of this volume 
I have done my humble best to discharge, convinced as 
I am that in the traffic in ideas between Germany and 
the English-speaking peoples all over the world both 
the matter of Professor Harnack' s discourse and the 
spirit in which he treats it are alike worthy of 
attention. 

T. BAILEY SAUNDERS. 

London, November, 1900. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

General Scope of the Lectures i 

I. THE GOSPEL: Preliminary . . . 10 

(i.) The Leading Features of Jesus' Message 21 

The kingdom of God and its coming . 56 
God the Father and the infinite value of 

the human soul 68 

The higher righteousness and the com- 
mandment of love ... 76 



(ii.) The Gospel in Relation to Certain 

Problems 84 

The Gospel and the world, or the ques- 
tion of asceticism ..... 85 

The Gospel and the poor, or the social 
question 95 

The Gospel and law, or the question of 
public order . . . . . .110 

The Gospel and work, or the question of 
civilisation . . . . . .126 

The Gospel and the Son of God, or the 
Christological question ... 133 

The Gospel and doctrine, or the question 
of creed ...... 157 



viii Contents 



II. THE GOSPEL IN HISTORY : 

The Christian Religion (i.) in the Apos- 
tolic Age . 164 
(ii.) in its Devel- 
opment INTO 
Catholicism 204 
" (iii.) in Greek 

Catholicism 233 
" " " (iv.) In Roman 

Catholicism 263 
" " " (v.) In Protest- 

antism . 287 



What is Christianity ? 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 



LECTURE I 

THE great English philosopher, John Stuart 
Mill, has somewhere observed that mankind 
cannot be too often reminded that there was once 
a man of the name of Socrates. That is true ; but 
still more important is it to remind mankind again 
and again that a man of the name of Jesus Christ 
once stood in their midst. The fact, of course, has 
been brought home to us from our youth up; but 
unhappily it cannot be said that public instruction 
in our time is calculated to keep the image of Jesus 
Christ before us in any impressive way, and make it 
an inalienable possession after our school-days are 
over and for our whole life. And although no one 
who has once absorbed a ray of Christ's light can 
ever again become as though he had never heard of 
him ; although at the bottom of every soul that has 
been once touched an impression remains, a con- 
fused recollection of this kind, which is often only a 
"superstitio," is not enough to give strength and 

i 



2 What is Christianity ? 

life. But where the demand for further and more 
trustworthy knowledge about him arises, and a man 
wants positive information as to who Jesus Christ 
was, and as to the real purport of his message, he 
no sooner asks for it than he finds himself, if he 
consults the literature of the day, surrounded by 
a clatter of contradictory voices. He hears some 
people maintaining that primitive Christianity was 
closely akin to Buddhism, and he is accordingly told 
that it is in fleeing the world and in pessimism that 
the sublime character of this religion and its pro- 
found meaning are revealed. Others, on the con- 
trary, assure him that Christianity is an optimistic 
religion, and that it must be thought of simply and 
solely as a higher phase of Judaism ; and these peo- 
ple also suppose that in saying this they have said 
something very profound. Others, again, maintain 
the opposite ; they assert that the Gospel did away 
with Judaism, but itself originated under Greek in- 
fluences of mysterious operation ; and that it is to 
be understood as a blossom on the tree of Hellen- 
ism. Religious philosophers come forward and de- 
clare that the metaphysical system which, as they 
say, was developed out of the Gospel is its real ker- 
nel and the revelation of its secret ; but others reply 
that the Gospel has nothing to do with philosophy, 
that it was meant for feeling and suffering human- 
ity, and that philosophy has only been forced upon 



Preliminary 3 

it. Finally, the latest critics that have come into the 
field assure us that the whole history of religion, 
morality, and philosophy, is nothing but wrapping 
and ornament ; that what at all times underlies 
them, as the only real motive power, is the history 
of economics; that, accordingly, Christianity, too, 
was in its origin nothing more than a social move- 
ment and Christ a social deliverer, the deliverer of 
the oppressed lower classes. 

There is something touching in the anxiety which 
everyone shows to rediscover himself, together with 
his own point of view and his own circle of interest, 
in this Jesus Christ, or at least to get a share in him. 
It is the perennial repetition of the spectacle which 
was seen in the " Gnostic " movement even as early 
as the second century, and which takes the form of 
a struggle, on the part of every conceivable tend- 
ency of thought, for the possession of Jesus Christ. 
Why, quite recently, not only, I think, Tolstoi's 
ideas, but even Nietzsche's, have been exhibited in 
their special affinty with the Gospel ; and there is 
perhaps more to be said even upon this subject that 
is worth attention than upon the connexion between 
a good deal of " theological " and " philosophical " 
speculation and Christ's teaching. 

But nevertheless, when taken together, the im- 
pression which these contradictory opinions convey 
is disheartening: the confusion seems hopeless. 



4 What is Christianity ? 

How can we take it amiss of anyone, if, after trying 
to find out how the question stands, he gives it up ? 
Perhaps he goes further, and declares that after all 
the question does not matter. How are we con- 
cerned with events that happened, or with a person 
who lived, nineteen hundred years ago ? We must 
look for our ideals and our strength to the present; 
to evolve them laboriously out of old manuscripts is 
a fantastic proceeding that can lead nowhere. The 
man who so speaks is not wrong; but neither is he 
right. What we are and what we possess, in any 
high sense, we possess from the past and by the 
past — only so much of it, of course, as has had re- 
sults and makes its influence felt up to the present 
day. To acquire a sound knowledge of the past is 
the business and the duty not only of the historian 
but also of everyone who wishes to make the wealth 
and the strength so gained his own. But that the 
Gospel is a part of this past which nothing else can 
replace has been affirmed again and again by the 
greatest minds. " Let intellectual and spiritual cult- 
ure progress, and the human mind expand, as 
much as it will ; beyond the grandeur and the moral 
elevation of Christianity, as it sparkles and shines 
in the Gospels, the human mind will not advance." 
In these words Goethe, after making many ex- 
periments and labouring indefatigably at himself, 
summed up the result to which his moral and histori- 



Preliminary 5 

cal insight had led him. Even though we were to 
feel no desire on our own part, it would still be worth 
while, because of this man's testimony, to devote 
our serious attention to what he came to regard as 
so precious; and if, contrary to his declaration, 
louder and more confident voices are heard to-day, 
proclaiming that the Christian religion has outlived 
itself, let us accept that as an invitation to make a 
closer acquaintance with this religion whose certifi- 
cate of death people suppose that they can already 
exhibit. 

But in truth this religion and the efforts which it 
evokes are more active to-day than they used to be. 
We may say to the credit of our age that it takes 
an eager interest in the problem of the nature and 
value of Christianity, and that there is more search 
and inquiry in regard to this subject now than was 
the case thirty years ago. Even in the experiments 
that are made in and about it, the strange and ab- 
struse replies that are given to questions, the way in 
which it is caricatured, the chaotic confusion which 
it exhibits, nay, even in the hatred that it excites, 
a real life and an earnest endeavour may be traced. 
Only do not let us suppose that there is anything 
exemplary in this endeavour, and that we are the 
first who, after shaking off an authoritative religion, 
are struggling after one that shall really make us free 
and be of independent growth — a struggle which 



6 What is Christianity ? 

must of necessity give rise to much confusion and 
half-truth. Sixty-two years ago Carlyle wrote : — 

In these distracted times, when the Religious Princi- 
ple, driven out of most Churches, either lies unseen in 
the hearts of good men, looking and longing and silently 
working there towards some new Revelation ; or else 
wanders homeless over the world, like a disembodied 
soul seeking its terrestrial organisation, — into how many 
strange shapes, of Superstition and Fanaticism, does it 
not tentatively and errantly cast itself ! The higher 
Enthusiasm of man's nature is for the while without 
Exponent ; yet does it continue indestructible, un- 
weariedly active, and work blindly in the great chaotic 
deep : thus Sect after Sect, and Church after Church, 
bodies itself forth, and melts again into new meta- 
morphosis. 

No one who understands the times in which we 
live can deny that these words sound as if they had 
been written to-day. But it is not with "the 
religious principle" and the ways in which it has 
developed that we are going to concern ourselves in 
these lectures. We shall try to answer the more 
modest but not less pressing question, What is 
Christianity ? What was it ? What has it become ? 
The answer to this question may, we hope, also 
throw light by the way on the more comprehensive 
one, What is Religion, and what ought it to be to 
us ? In dealing with religion, is it not after all with 
the Christian religion alone that we have to do ? 



Preliminary 



Other religions no longer stir the depths of our 
hearts. 



What is Christianity ? It is solely in its historical 
sense that we shall try to answer this question here ; 
that is to say, we shall employ the methods of his- 
torical science, and the experience of life gained by 
studying the actual course of history. This ex- 
cludes the view of the question taken by the apolo- 
gist and the religious philosopher. On this point 
permit me to say a few words. 

Apologetics hold a necessary place in religious 
knowledge, and to demonstrate the validity of the 
Christian religion and exhibit its importance for the 
moral and intellectual life is a great and a worthy 
undertaking. But this undertaking must be kept 
quite separate from the purely historical question 
as to the nature of that religion, or else historical 
research will be brought into complete discredit. 
Moreover, in the kind of apologetics that is now re- 
quired no really high standard has yet been attained. 
Apart from a few steps that have been taken in the 
direction of improvement, apologetics as a subject 
of study is in a deplorable state : it is not clear as to 
the positions to be defended, and it is uncertain as 
to the means to be employed. It is also not infre- 
quently pursued in an undignified and obtrusive 
fashion. Apologists imagine that they are doing a 




8 What is Christianity ? 

great work by crying up religion as though it were 
a job-lot at a sale, or a universal remedy for all 
social ills. They are perpetually snatching, too, at 
all sorts of baubles, so as to deck out religion in fine 
clothes. In their endeavour to present it as a glori- 
ous necessity, they deprive it of its earnest character, 
and at the best only prove that it is something 
which may be safely accepted because it can do no 
harm. Finally, they cannot refrain from slipping 
in some church programme of yesterday and " de- 
monstrating" its claims as well. The structure of 
their ideas is so loose that an idea or two more 
makes no difference. The mischief that has been 
thereby done already and is still being done is 
indescribable. No ! the Christian religion is some- 
thing simple and sublime; it means one thing and 
one thing only : Eterna l life in the mids t_of time, 
by the strength ancTunder the eyes of God. It is 
no ethical or social arcanum for the preservation or 
improvement of things generally. Toj nake wha t it 
has done for civilisation and human progress the 
main question, and to determine its value by the 
answer, is to do it violence at the sta rt. Goethe 
once said, " Mankind is always advancing, and 
I man always remains the same." It is to man that 
religion pertains, to man, as one who in the midst 
of all change and progress himself never changes. 
Christian apologetics must recognise, then, that it is 



Preliminary 9 

with religion in its simple nature and its simple 
strength that it has to do. Religion, truly, does not 
exist for itself alone, but lives in an inner fellowship 
with all the activities of the mind and with moral 
and economical conditions as well. But it is em- 
phatically not a mere function or an exponent of 
them ; it is a mighty power that sets to work of it- 
self, hindering or furthering, destroying or making 
fruitful. The main thing is to learn what religion 
is and in what its essential character consists ; no 
matter what position the individual who examines 
it may take up in regard to it, or whether in his 
own life he values it or not. 

But the point of view of the philosophical theo- 
rist, in the strict sense of the word, will also find no 
place in these lectures. Had they been delivered 
sixty years ago, it would have been our endeavour 
to try to arrive by speculative reasoning at some 
general conception of religion, and then to define the 
Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly 
become sceptical about the value of this procedure. 
Latet dolus in generalibus. We know to-day that 
life cannot be spanned by general conceptions, and 
that there is no general conception of religion to 
which actual religions are related simply and solely 
as species to genus. . Nay, the question may even 
be asked whether there is any such generic concep- 
tion as " religion " at all. Is the common element 



io What is Christianity ? 

in it anything more than a vague disposition ? Is 
it only an empty place in our innermost being that 
the word denotes, which everyone fills up in a dif- 
ferent fashion and many do not perceive at all? I 
am not of this opinion; I am convinced, rather, 
that at bottom we have to do here with something 
which is common to us all, and which in the course 
of history has struggled up out of torpor and discord 
into unity and light. I am convinced that August- 
ine is right when he says, " Thou, Lord, hast 
made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until 
it finds rest in Thee." But to prove that this is so; 
to exhibit the nature and the claims of religion by 
psychological analysis, including the psychology of 
peoples, is not the task that we shall undertake in 
what follows. We shall keep to the purely histor- 
ical theme : What is the Christian religion ? 

Where are we to look for our materials ? The 
answer seems to be simple and at the same time 
exhaustive : . Jesus Christ and his Gospel. But how- 
ever little doubt there may be that this must form 
not only our point of departure but also the matter 
with which our investigations will mainly deal, it is 
equally certain that we must not be content to ex- 
hibit the mere image of Jesus Christ and the main 
features of his Gospel. We must not be content to 
stop there, because every great and powerful per- 
sonality reveals a part of what it is only when seen 



The Gospel n 

in those whom it influences. Nay, it may be said 
that the more powerful the personality which a 
man possesses, and the more he takes hold of the in- 
ner life of others, the less can the sum-total of what 
he is be known only by what he himself says and 
does. We must look at the reflection and the 
effects which he produced in those whose leader and 
master he became. That is why a complete answer 
to the question, What is Christianity, is impossible 
so long as we are restricted to Jesus Christ's teach- 
ing alone. We must include the first generation of 
his disciples as well — those who ate and drank with 
him — and we must listen to what they tell us of the 
effect which he had upon their lives. 

But even this does not exhaust our materials. If 
Christianity is an example of a great power valid not 
for one particular epoch alone ; if in and through it, 
not once only, but again and again, great forces 
have been disengaged, we must include all the later 
products of its spirit. It is not a question of a 
" doctrine" being handed down by uniform repe- 
tition or arbitrarily distorted ; it is a question of a 
life, again and again kindled afresh, and now burn- 
ing with a flame of its own. We may also add that 
Christ himself and the apostles were convinced 
that the religion which they were planting would 
in the ages to come have a greater destiny and a 
deeper meaning than it possessed at the time of its 



1 2 What is Christianity ? 

institution ; they trusted to its spirit leading from 
one point of light to another and developing higher 
forces. Just as we cannot obtain a complete know- 
ledge of a tree without regarding not only its root 
and its stem but also its bark, its branches, and the 
way in which it blooms, so we cannot form any 
right estimate of the Christian religion unless we 
take our stand upon a comprehensive induction that 
shall cover all the facts of its history. It is true 
that Christianity has had its classical epoch; nay 
more, it had a founder who himself was what he 
taught — to steep ourselves in him is still the chief 
matter; but to restrict ourselves to him means to 
take a point of view too low for his significance. 
Individual religious life was what he wanted to 
kindle and what he did kindle ; it is, as we shall see, 
his peculiar greatness to have led men to God, so 
that they may thenceforth live their own life with 
Him. How, then, can we be silent about the his- 
tory of the Gospel if we wish to know what he was ? 
It may be objected that put in this way the prob- 
lem is too difficult, and that its solution threatens 
to be accompanied by many errors and defects. 
That is not to be denied; but to state a problem in 
easier terms, that is to say in this case inaccurately, 
because of the difficulties surrounding it, would be 
a very perverse expedient. Moreover, even though 
the difficulties increase, the work is, on the other 



The Gospel 13 

hand, facilitated by the problem being stated in a 
larger manner; for it helps us to grasp what is es- 
sential in the phenomena, and to distinguish kernel 
and husk. 

Jesus Christ and his disciples were situated in 
their day just as we are situated in ours; that is to 
say, their feelings, their thoughts, their judgments 
and their efforts were bounded by the horizon and 
the framework in which their own nation was set 
and by its condition at the time. Had it been other- 
wise, they would not have been men of flesh and 
blood, but spectral beings. For seventeen hundred 
years, indeed, people thought, and many among us 
still think, that the " humanity" of Jesus Christ, 
which is a part of their creed, is sufficiently provided 
for by the assumption that he had a human body 
and a human soul. As if it were possible to have 
that without having any definite character as an in- 
dividual! To be a man means, in the first place, to 
possess a certain mental and spiritual disposition, 
determined in such and such a way, and thereby 
limited and circumscribed ; and, in the second 
place, it means to be situated, with this disposition, 
in an historical environment which in its turn is also 
limited and circumscribed. Outside this there are 
no such things as " men.'* It at once follows, how- 
ever, that a man can think, speak, and do absolutely 
nothing at all in which his peculiar disposition and 



1 4 What is Christianity? 

his own age are not coefficients. A single word 
may seem to be really classical and valid for all time, 
and yet the very language in which it is spoken 
gives it very palpable limitations. Much less is 
a spiritual personality, as a whole, susceptible of 
being represented in a way that will banish the feel- 
ing of its limitations, and with those limitations, 
the sense of something strange or conventional ; and 
this feeling must necessarily be enhanced the farther 
in point of time the spectator is removed. 

From these circumstances it follows that the his- 
torian, whose business and highest duty it is to de- 
termine what is of permanent value, is of necessity 
required not to cleave to words but to find out what 
is essential. The "whole" Christ, the "whole" 
Gospel, if we mean by this motto the external im- 
age taken in all its details and set up for imitation, 
is just as bad and deceptive a shibboleth as the 
11 whole " Luther, and the like. It is bad because 
it enslaves us, and it is deceptive because the peo- 
ple who proclaim it do not think of taking it seri- 
ously, and could not do so if they tried. They 
cannot do so because they cannot cease to feel, un- 
derstand and judge as children of their age. 

There are only two possibilities here : either the 
Gospel is in all respects identical with its earliest 
form, in which case it came with its time and has 
departed with it; or else it contains something 



The Gospel 15 

which, under differing historical forms, is of perma- 
nent validity. The latter is the true view. The 
history of the Church shows us in its very com- 
mencement that "primitive Christianity" had to 
disappear in order that " Christianity " might re- 
main; and in the same way in later ages one 
metamorphosis followed upon another. From the 
beginning it was a question of getting rid of formu- 
las, correcting expectations, altering ways of feel- 
ing, and this is a process to which there is no end. 
But by the very fact that our survey embraces the 
whole course as well as the inception we enhance our 
standard of what is essential and of real value. 

We enhance our standard, but we need not wait 
to take it from the history of those later ages. The 
thing itself reveals it. We shall see that the Gospel 
in the Gospel is something so simple, something 
that speaks to us with so much power, that it can- 
not easily be mistaken. No far-reaching directions 
as to method, no general introductions, are neces- 
sary to enable us to find the way to it. No one 
who possesses a fresh «ye for what is alive, and a 
true feeling for what is really great, can fail to see 
it and distinguish it from its contemporary integu- 
ment. And even though there may be many indi- 
vidual aspects of it where the task of distinguishing 
what is permanent from what is fleeting, what is 
rudimentary from what is merely historical, is not 



16 What is Christianity? 

quite easy, we must not be like the child who, want- 
ing to get at the kernel of a bulb, went on picking 
off the leaves until there was nothing left, and then 
could not help seeing that it was just the leaves that 
made the bulb. Endeavours of this kind are not 
unknown in the history of the Christian religion, 
but they fade before those other endeavours which 
seek to convince us that there is no such thing as 
either kernel or husk, growth or decay, but that 
everything is of equal value and alike permanent. 

In these lectures, then, we shall deal first of all 
with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and this theme will 
occupy the greater part of our attention. We shall 
then show what impression he himself and his Gos- 
pel made upon the first generation of his disciples. 
Finally, we shall follow the leading changes which 
the Christian idea has undergone in the course of 
history, and try to recognise its chief types. What 
is common to all the forms which it has taken, cor- 
rected by reference to the Gospel, and, conversely, 
the chief features of the Gospel, corrected by refer- 
ence to history, will, we may be allowed to hope, 
bring us to the kernel of the matter. Within the 
limits of a short series of lectures it is, of course, 
only to what is important that attention can be 
called ; but perhaps there will be no disadvantage in 
fixing our attention, for once, only on the strong 
lines and prominent points of the relief, and, by 



1 



The Gospel 17 

putting what is secondary into the background, in 
looking at the vast material in a concentrated form. 
We shall even refrain, and permissibly refrain, from 
enlarging, by way of introduction, on Judaism and 
its external and internal relations, and on the 
Graeco-Roman world. We must never, of course, 
wholly shut our eyes to them — nay, we must always 
keep them in mind ; but diffuse explanations in re- 
gard to these matters are unnecessary. Jesus 
Christ's teaching will at once bring us by steps 
which, if few, will be great, to a height wh ere its 
c onnexion with Judaism is seen to be only a loose 
one, and most of the threads leading from it into 
" contemporary history " become of no importance \ 
at all. This may seem a paradoxical thing to say;^l 
for just now we are being earnestly assured, with 
an air as though it were some new discovery that 
was being imparted to us, that Jesus Christ's teach- 
ing cannot be understood, nay, cannot be accurately 
represented, except by having regard to its con- 
nexion with the Jewish doctrines prevalent at the 
time, and by first of all setting them out in full. 
There is much that is true in this statement, and 
yet, as we shall see, it is incorrect. It becomes ab- 
solutely false, however, when worked' up into the 
dazzling thesis that the Gospel is intelligible only as 
the religion of a despairing section of the Jewish na- 
tion ; that it was the last effort of a decadent age, 



1 8 What is Christianity? 

driven by distress into a renunciation of this earth, 
and then trying to storm heaven and demanding 
civic rights there — a religion of miserabilism ! It is 
rather remarkable that the really desperate were 
just those who did not welcome it, but fought 
against it ; remarkable that its leaders, so far as we 
know them, do not, in fact, bear any of the marks 
of sickly despair ; most remarkable of all, that while 
indeed renouncing the world and its goods, they 
establish, in love and holiness, a brotherly union 
which declares war on the world's misery. The 
oftener I re-read and consider the Gospels, the more 
do I find that the contemporary discords, in the 
midst of which the Gospel stood, and out of which 
it arose, sink into the background. I entertain no 
doubt that the founder had his eye upon man in 
whatever external situation he might be found — 
upon man who, fundamentally, always remains the 
same, whether he be moving upwards or down- 
wards, whether he be in riches or poverty, whether 
he be of strong mind or of weak. It is the con- 
sciousness of all these oppositions being ultimately 
beneath it, and of its own place above them, that 
gives the Gospel its sovereignty ; for in every man 
it looks to the point that is unaffected by all these 
differences. This is very clear in Paul's case; he 
dominates all earthly things and circumstances like 
a king, and desires to see them so dominated. The 



The Gospel 19 

thesis of the decadent age and the religion of the 
wretched may serve to lead us into the outer court ; 
it may even correctly point to that which originally 
gave the Gospel its form ; but if it is offered us as a 
key for the understanding of this religion in itself, 
we must reject it. Moreover, this thesis and the 
pretensions which it makes are only illustrations of 
a fashion which has become general in the writing 
of history, and which in that province will naturally 
have a longer reign than other fashions, because by 
its means much that was obscure has, as a matter 
of fact, been cleared up. But to the heart of the 
matter its devotees do not penetrate, as they 
silently assume that no such heart exists. 

Let me conclude this lecture by touching briefly 
on one other important point. In history absolute 
judgments are impossible. This is a truth which in 
these days — I say advisedly, in these days — is clear 
and incontestable. History can only show how 
things have been; and even where we can throw 
light upon the past, and understand and criticise it, 
we must not presume to think that by any process 
of abstraction absolute judgments as to the value to 
be assigned to past events can be obtained from the 
results of a purely historical survey. Such judg- 
ments are the creation only of feeling and of will; 
they are a subjective act. The false notion that the 
understanding can produce them is a heritage of 



20 What is Christianity ? 

that protracted epoch in which knowing and know- 
ledge were expected to accomplish everything; in 
which it was believed that they could be stretched 
so as to be capable of covering and satisfying all 
the needs of the mind and the heart. That they 
cannot do. This is a truth which, in many an hour 
of ardent work, falls heavily upon our soul, and yet 
— what a hopeless thing it would be for mankind if 
the higher peace to which it aspires, and the clear- 
ness, the certainty and the strength for which it 
strives, were dependent on the measure of its learn- 
ing and its knowledge. 



LECTURE II 

OUR first section deals with the main features 
of the message delivered by Jesus Christ. 
They include the form in which he delivered what 
he had to say. We shall see how essential a part of 
his character is here exhibited, for " he spoke as one 
having authority and not as the Scribes." But be- 
fore describing these features I feel it my duty to 
tell you briefly how matters stand in regard to the 
sources of our knowledge. 

Our authorities for the message which Jesus 
Christ delivered are — apart from certain important 
statements made by Paul — the first three Gospels. 
Everything that we know, independently of these 
Gospels, about Jesus' history and his teaching, may 
be easily put on a small sheet of paper, so little 
does it come to. In particular, the fourth Gospel, 
which does not emanate or profess to emanate 
from the apostle John, cannot be taken as an his- 
torical authority in the ordinary meaning of the 
word. The author of it acted with sovereign free- 
dom, transposed events and put them in a strange 
light, drew up the discourses himself, and illustrated 

21 



(1 






22 What is Christianity ? 

great thoughts by imaginary situations. Although, 
therefore, his work is not altogether devoid of a 
real, if scarcely recognisable, traditional element, it 
can hardly make any claim to be considered an 
authority for Jesus' history; only little of what he 
says can be accepted, and that little with caution. 
On the other hand, it is an authority of the first 
rank for answering the question, What vivid views 
of Jesus' person, what kind of light and warmth, 
did the Gospel disengage ? 

Sixty years ago David Friedrich Strauss thought 
that he had almost entirely destroyed the historical 
credibility not only of the fourth but also of the 
first three Gospels as well. The historical criticism 
of two generations has succeeded in restoring that 
credibility in its main outlines. These Gospels are 
not, it is true, historical works any more than the 
fourth ; they were not written with the simple ob- 
ject of giving the facts as they were ; they are books 
composed for the work of evangelisation. Their 
purpose is to awaken a belief in Jesus Christ's per- 
son and mission ; and the purpose is served by the 
description of his deeds and discourses, as well as 
by the references to the Old Testament. Neverthe- 
less they are not altogether useless as sources of his- 
tory, more especially as the object with which they 
were written is not supplied from without, but coin- 
cides in part with what Jesus intended. But such 



The Gospel 23 

other great leading purposes as have been ascribed 
to the evangelists have been one and all shown to 
lack any foundation, although with each individual 
evangelist many secondary purposes may have come 
into play. The Gospels are not "party tracts"; 
neither are they writings which as yet bear the radi- 
cal impress of the Greek spirit. In their essential 
substance they belong to the first, the Jewish, epoch 
of Christianity, that brief epoch which may be de- 
noted as the palaeontological. That we possess any 
reports dating from that time, even though, as is 
obvious in the first and third Gospel, the setting 
and the composition are by another hand, is one of 
those historical arrangements for which we cannot 
be too thankful. Criticism to-day universally re- 
cognises the unique character of the Gospels. What 
especially marks them off from all subsequent liter- 
ature is the way in which they state their facts. 
This species of literary art, which took shape partly 
by analogy with the didactic narratives of the Jews, 
and partly from catechetical necessities — this simple 
and impressive form of exposition was, even a few 
decades later, no longer capable of exact reproduc- 
tion. From the time that the Gospel was trans- 
ferred to the broad ground of the Graeco-Roman 
world it appropriated the literary forms of the 
Greeks, and the style of the evangelists was then 
felt to be something strange but sublime. When 



24 What is Christianity ? 

all is said, the Greek language lies upon these writ- 
ings only like a diaphanous veil, and it requires 
hardly any effort to retranslate their contents into 
Hebrew or Aramaic. That the tradition here pre- 
sented to us is, in the main, at first hand is obvious. 
How fixed this tradition was in regard to its form 
is proved by the third Gospel. It was composed by 
a Greek, probably in the time of Domitian; and in 
the second part of his work, the Acts of the Apostles 
— besides the preface to the first — he shows us that 
he was familiar with the literary language of his 
nation and that he was an excellent master of style. 
But in the Gospel narrative he did not dare to 
abandon the traditional type : he tells his story in 
the same style as Mark and Matthew, with the same 
connexion of sentences, the same colour, nay, with 
many of precisely the same details; it is only the 
ruder words and expressions, which would offend 
literary taste, that are sparingly corrected. There 
is another respect, too, in which his Gospel strikes 
us as remarkable: he assures us at the beginning of 
it that he has " had perfect understanding of all 
things from the very first," and has examined many 
accounts. But if we test him by his authorities, 
we find that he has kept in the main to Mark's Gos- 
pel, and to a source which we also find appearing 
again in Matthew. These accounts both seemed to 
him, as a respectable chronicler, to be preferable to 



The Gospel 25 

the crowd of others. That offers a good guarantee 
for them. No historian has found that it is possible 
or necessary to substitute any other tradition for 
the one which we have here. 

Another point: this tradition is, apart from the 
story of the Passion, almost exclusively Galilean in 
its character. Had not the history of Jesus' public 
activity been really bounded by this geographical 
horizon, tradition could not have so described it; 
for every historical narrative with an eye to effect 
would have represented him as working chiefly in 
Jerusalem. That is the account given by the fourth 
Gospel. That our first three evangelists almost en- 
tirely refrain from saying anything about Jerusalem 
arouses a good prejudice in their favour. 

It is true that, measured by the standard of 
"agreement, inspiration and completeness, " these 
writings leave a very great deal to be desired, and 
even when judged by a more human standard they 
suffer from not a few imperfections. Rude addi- 
tions from a later age they do not, indeed, exhibit 
— it will always remain a noteworthy fact that, con- 
versely, it is only the fourth Gospel which makes 
Greeks ask after Jesus — but still they, too, reflect, 
here and there, the circumstances in which the 
primitive Christian community was placed and the 
experiences which it afterwards underwent. People 
nowadays, however, put such constructions on the 



26 What is Christianity ? 

text more readily than is necessary. Further, the 
conviction that Old Testament prophecy was ful- 
filled in Jesus' history had a disturbing effect on 
tradition. Lastly, in some of the narratives the 
miraculous element is obviously intensified. On 
the other hand, Strauss' contention that the Gos- 
pels contain a very great deal that is mythical has 
and not been borne out, even if the very indefinite 
defective conception of what "mythical" means 
in Strauss' application of the word, be allowed to 
pass. It is almost exclusively in the account of 
Jesus' childhood, and there only sparingly, that a 
mythical touch can be traced. None of these dis- 
turbing elements affect the heart of the narrative; 
not a few of them easily lend themselves to correc- 
tion, partly by a comparison of the Gospels one 
with another, partly through the sound judgment 
that is matured by historical study. 

But the miraculous element, all these reports of 
miracles! Not Strauss only, but many others too, 
have allowed themselves to be frightened by them 
into roundly denying the credibility of the Gospels. 
But, on the other hand, historical science in this 
last generation has taken a great step in advance by 
learning to pass a more intelligent and benevolent 
judgment on those narratives, and accordingly even 
reports of the marvellous can now be counted 
amongst the materials of history and turned to good 



The Miraculous Element 27 

account. I owe it to you and to the subject briefly 
to specify the position which historical science to- 
day takes up in regard to these reports. 

In the first place, we know that the Gospels come 
from a time in which the marvellous may be said to 
have been something of almost daily occurrence. 
People felt and saw that they were surrounded by 
wonders, and not by any means only in the religious 
sphere. Certain spiritualists among us excepted, 
we are now accustomed to associate the question of 
miracles exclusively with the question of religion. 
In those days it was otherwise. The fountains of 
the marvellous were many. Some sort of divinity 
was, of course, supposed to be at work in every 
case ; it was a god who accomplished the miracle ; 
but it was not to every god that people stood in a 
religious relation. Further, in those days, the strict 
conception which we now attach to the word " mir- 
acle " was as yet unknown ; it came in only with a 
knowledge of the laws of Nature and their general 
validity. Before that, no sound insight existed into 
what was possible and what was impossible, what 
was rule and what was exception. But where this 
distinction is not clear, or where, as the case may 
be, the question has not yet been raised at all in any 
rigorous form, there are no such things as miracles 
in the strict sense of the word. No one can feel 
anything to be an interruption of the order of 



28 What is Christianity ? 

Nature who does not yet know what the order of 
Nature is. Miracles, then, could not possess the 
significance for that age which, if they existed, 
they would possess for ours. For that age all won- 
ders were only extraordinary events, and, even if 
they formed a world by themselves, it was certain 
that there were countless points in which that other 
world mysteriously encroached upon our own. Nor 
was it only God's messengers, but magicians and 
charlatans as well, who were thought to be pos- 
sessed of some of these miraculous powers. The 
significance attaching to " miracles " was, therefore, 
in those days a subject of never-ending controversy ; 
at one moment a high value was set upon them and 
they were considered to belong to the very essence 
of religion; at another, they were spoken of with 
contempt. 

In the second place, we now know that it is not 
after they have been long dead, nor even after the 
lapse of many years, that miracles have been re- 
ported of eminent persons, but at once, often the 
very next day. The habit of condemning a narrat- 
ive, or of ascribing it to a later age, only because 
it includes stories of miracles, is a piece of prejudice. 

In the third place, we are firmly convinced that 
what happens in space and time is subject to the 
general laws of motion, and that in this sense, as 
an interruption of the order of Nature, there can be 



The Miraculous Element 29 

no such things as " miracles." But we also recog- 
nise that the religious man — if religion really per- 
meates him and is something more than a belief in 
the religion of others — is certain that he is not shut 
up within a blind and brutal course of Nature, but 
that this course of Nature serves higher ends, or, as 
it may be, that some inner and divine power can 
help us so to encounter it as that " everything must 
necessarily be for the best." This experience, 
which I might express in one word as the ability to 
escape from the power and the service of transitory 
/things, is always felt afresh to be a miracle each 
Hime that it occurs; it is inseparable from every 
higher religion, and were it to be surrendered, re- 
ligion would be at an end. But it is an experience 
which is equally true of the life of the individual 
and of the great course of human history. How 
clearly and logically, then, must a religious man 
think, if, in spite of this experience, he holds firmly 
to the inviolable character of what happens in space 
and time. Who can wonder that even great minds 
fail to keep the two spheres quite separate ? And 
as we all live, first and foremost, in the domain not 
of ideas but of perceptions, and in a language of 
metaphor, how can we avoid conceiving that which 
is divine and makes us free as a mighty power work- 
ing upon the order of Nature, and breaking through 
or arresting it? This notion, though it belong only 



30 What is Christianity ? 

to the realm of fantasy and metaphor, will, it seems, 
last as long as religion itself. 

In the fourth place, and lastly, although the or- 
der of Nature be inviolable, we are not yet by any 
means acquainted with all the forces working in it 
and acting reciprocally with other forces. Our ac- 
quaintance even with the forces inherent in matter, 
and with the field of their action, is incomplete; 
while of psychic forces we know very much less. 
We see that a strong will and a firm faith exert an 
influence upon the life of the body, and produce 
phenomena which strike us as marvellous. Who is 
there up to now that has set any sure bounds to the 
province of the possible and the actual? No one. 
Who can say how far the influence of soul upon soul 
and of soul upon body reaches? No one. Who 
can still maintain that any extraordinary phenome- 
non that may appear in this domain is entirely based 
on error and delusion? Miracles, it is true, do not 
happen ; but of the marvellous and the inexplicable 
there is plenty. In our present state of knowledge 
we have become more careful, more hesitating in 
our judgment, in regard to the stories of the mirac- 
ulous which we have received from antiquity. That 
the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass 
spoke ; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do 
not believe, and we shall never again believe ; but 
that the lame walked, the blind saw, and the deaf 



The Miraculous Element 31 

heard will not be so summarily dismissed as an 
illusion. 

From these suggestions you can arrive for your- 
selves at the right position to take up in regard to 
the miraculous stories related in the Gospels, and at 
their net results. In particular cases, that is to say, 
in the application of general principles to concrete 
statements, some uncertainty will always remain. 
So far as I can judge, the stories may be grouped as 
follows: — (1) Stories which had their origin in an 
exaggerated view of natural events of an impressive 
character ; (2) stories which had their origin in say- 
ings or parables, or in the projection of inner ex- 
periences on to the external world ; (3) stories such 
as arose in the interests of the fulfilment of Old 
Testament sayings; (4) stories of surprising cures 
effected by Jesus' spiritual force ; (5) stories of which 
we cannot fathom the secret. It is very remark- 
able, however, that Jesus himself did not assign 
that critical importance to his miraculous deeds 
which even the evangelist Mark and the others all 
attributed to them. Did he not exclaim, in tones 
of complaint and accusation, " Unless ye see signs 
^and wonders, ye will not believe!" ? He who ut- 
tered these words cannot have held that belief in 
the wonders which he wrought was the right or the 
only avenue to the recognition of his person and his 
mission ; nay, in all essential points he must have 



32 What is Christianity? 

thought of them quite otherwise than his evangel- 
ists. And the remarkable fact that these very 
evangelists, without appreciating its range, hand 
down the statement that Jesus " did not many- 
mighty works there because of their unbelief," 
shows us, from another and a different side, with 
what caution we must receive these miraculous 
stories, and into what category we must put them. 
It follows from all this that we must not try to 
evade the Gospel by entrenching ourselves behind 
the miraculous stories related by the evangelists. In 
spite of those stories, nay, in part even in them, we 
are presented with a reality which has claims upon 
our participation. Study it, and do not let your- 
selves be deterred because this or that miraculous 
story strikes you as strange or leaves you cold. If 
there is anything here that you find unintelligible, 
put it quietly aside. Perhaps you will have to leave 
it there forever ; perhaps the meaning will dawn 
upon you later and the story assume a significance 
of which you never dreamt. Once more, let me say : 
do not be deterred. The question of miracles is of 
relative indifference in comparison with everything 
else which is to be found in the Gospels. It is not 
miracles that matter; the question on which every- 
thing turns is whether we are helplessly yoked to 
^n inexorable necessity, or whether a God exists 
who rules and governs, and whose power to compel 



Jesus' History 33 

Nature we can move by prayer and make a part of 
our experience. 

Our evangelists, as we know, do not tell us any- 
thing about the history of Jesus' early develop- 
ment ; they tell us only of his public activity. Two 
of the Gospels do, it is true, contain an introduc- 
tory history (the history of Jesus' birth); but we 
may disregard it; for even if it contained something 
more trustworthy than it does actually contain, it 
would be as good as useless for our purpose. That 
is to say, the evangelists themselves never refer to 
it, nor make Jesus himself refer to his antecedents. 
On the contrary, they tell us that Jesus' mother 
and his brethren were completely surprised at his 
coming forward, and did not know what to make of 
it. Paul, too, is silent; so that we can be sure that 
the oldest tradition knew nothing of any stories of 
Jesus' birth. 

We know nothing of Jesus' history for the first 
thirty years of his life. Is there not a terrible un- 
certainty here ? What is there left us if we have to 
begin our task by confessing that we are unable to 
write any life of Jesus ? How can we write the his- 
tory of a man of whose development we know no- 
thing, and with only a year or two of whose life we 
are acquainted ? Now, however certain it may be 

that our materials are insufficient for a "biography," 
3 



34 What is Christianity ? 

they are very weighty in other respects, and even 
their silence on the first thirty years is instructive. 
They are weighty because they give us information 
upon three important points: In the first place, they 
offer us a plain picture of Jesus' teaching, in regard 
both to its main features and to its individual applica- 
tion ; in the second place, they tell us how his life is- 
sued in the service of his vocation ; and in the third 
place, they describe to us the impression which he made 
upon his disciples, and which they transmitted. 

These are, in fact, three important points; nay, 
they are the points on which everything turns. It 
is because we can get a clear view of them that a 
characteristic picture of Jesus is possible; or, to 
speak more modestly, that there is some hope for 
an attempt to understand what his aims were, 
what he was, and what he signifies for us. 

As regards the thirty years of silence, we gather 
from our evangelists that Jesus did not think it 
necessary to give his disciples any information 
about them. But much may be said about them 
negatively. First of all, it is very improbable that 
he went through any Rabbinical school ; he nowhere 
speaks like a man who had assimilated any theo- 
logical culture of a technical kind, or learned the art 
of scholarly exegesis. Compare him in this respect 
with the apostle Paul; how clearly it can be seen 
from the latter' s epistles that he had sat at the feet 



Jesus' History 35 

of theological teachers. With Jesus we find no- 
thing of the kind ; and hence he caused a stir by 
appearing in the schools and teaching at all. He 
lived and had his being in the sacred writings, but 
not after the manner of a professional teacher. ^^^^\ 
Neither can he have had any relations with the \ 
Essenes, a remarkable order of Jewish monks. ^^ 
Were that so, he would have belonged to the pupils 
who show their dependence on their teachers by 
proclaiming and doing the opposite of what they 
have been taught. The Essenes made a point of 
the most extreme purity in the eye of the law, and 
held severely aloof not only from the impure but 
even from those who were a little lax in their purity. 
It is only thus that we can understand their living 
strictly apart, their dwelling in particular places, 
and their practice of frequent ablutions every day. 
Tesus exhibits a complete contrast with this mode 
j/ of life : he goes in search of sinners and eats with 
*» them. So fundamental a difference alone makes it 
certain that he had nothing to do with the Essenes. ^i 
His aims and the means which he employed divide 
him off from them. If he appears to coincide with 
them in many of his individual injunctions to his 
disciples, these are accidental points of contact, as 
his motives were quite other than theirs. 

Further, unless all appearances are deceptive, no 
stormy crisis, no breach with his past, lies behind 



36 What is Christianity ? 

the period of Jesus' life that we know. In none of 
his sayings or discourses, whether he is threatening 
and punishing or drawing and calling people to him 
with kindness, whether he is speaking of his relation 
to the Father or to the world, can we discover the 
signs of inner revolutions overcome, or the scars of 
any terrible conflict. Everything seems to pour 
from him naturally, as though it could not do other- 
wise, like a spring from the depths of the earth, 
clear and unchecked in its flow. Where shall we 
find the man who at the age of thirty can so speak, 
if he has gone through bitter struggles — struggles 
of the soul, in which he has ended by burning what 
he once adored, and by adoring what he burned? 
Where shall we find the man who has broken with 
his past, in order to summon others to repentance 
as well as himself, but who through it all never 
speaks of his own repentance ? This consideration 
makes it impossible that his life could have been 
spent in inner conflict, however little it may have 
been lacking in deep emotion, in temptation and in 
doubt. 

One final point: the picture of Jesus' life and his 
discourses stand in no relation with the Greek spirit. 
That is almost a matter for surprise; for Galilee was 
full of Greeks, and Greek was then spoken in many 
of its cities, much as Swedish is nowadays in Fin- 
land. There were Greek teachers and philosophers 



Jesus' History 37 

there, and it is scarcely conceivable that Jesus 
should have been entirely unacquainted with their 
language. But that he was in any way influenced 
by them, that he was ever in touch with the 
thoughts of Plato or the Porch, even though it may 
have been only in some popular redaction, it is ab- 
solutely impossible to maintain. Of course if re- 
ligious individualism — God and the soul, the soul 
and its God ; if subjectivism ; if the full self-respons- 
ibility of the individual; if the separation of the 
religious from the political — if all this is only Greek, 
then Jesus, too, stands within the sphere of Greek 
development; then he, too, breathed the pure air 
of Greece and drank from the Greek spring. But it 
cannot be proved that it is only on this one line, 
only in the Hellenic people, that this development 
took place ; nay, it is rather the contrary that can 
be shown; other nations also advanced to similar 
states of knowledge and feeling ; although they did 
so, it is true, as a rule, only after Alexander the 
Great had pulled down the barriers and fences which 
separated the peoples. For these nations, too, no 
doubt it was in the majority of cases the Greek ele- 
ment that was the liberating and progressive factor. 
But I do not believe that the Psalmist who uttered 
the words, " Whom have I in heaven but thee ? and 
there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee," 
had ever heard anything of Socrates or of Plato. 



38 What is Christianity ? 

Enough: from their silence on the first thirty 
years of Jesus' life, and from what the evangelists 
do not tell us of the period of his activity, there are 
important things to be learnt. 

He lived in religion, and it was breath to him in 
the fear of God ; his whole life, all his thoughts and 
feelings, were absorbed in the relation to God, and 
yet he did not talk like an enthusiast and a fanatic, 
who sees only one red-hot spot, and so is blind to 
the world and all that it contains. He spoke his 
message and looked at the world with a fresh and 
clear eye for the life, great and small, that sur- 
rounded him. He proclaimed that to gain the whole 
world was nothing if the soul were injured, and yet 
S he remained kind and sympathetic to every living 
thing. That is the most astonishing and the great- 
est fact about him ! His discourses, generally in 
the form of parables and sayings, exhibit every de- 
gree of human speech and the whole range of the 
emotions. The sternest tones of passionate accusa- 
tion and indignant reproof, nay, even irony, he does 
not despise ; but they must have formed the excep- 
tion with him. He is possessed of a quiet, uniform, 
collected demeanour, with everything directed to 
,one goal. He never uses any ecstatic language, 
and the tone of stirring prophecy is rare. En- 
tusted with the greatest of all missions, his eye and 



(■■ 



Jesus' Teaching 39 

ear are open to every impression of the life around 
him —a proof of intense calm and absolute certainty. 

Mourning and weeping, laughing and dancing, wealth 
and poverty, hunger and thirst, health and sickness, 
children's play and politics, gathering and scattering, the 
leaving of home, life in the inn and the return, marriage 
and funeral, the splendid house of the living and the 
grave of the dead, the sower and the reaper in the field, 
the lord of the vintage among his vines, the idle work- 
man in the marketplace, the shepherd searching for the 
sheep, the dealer in pearls on the sea, and, then again, 
the woman at home anxious over the barrel of meal and 
the leaven, or the lost piece of money, the widow's com- 
plaint to the surly official, the earthly food that perishes, 
the mental relation of teacher and pupil, on the one side 
regal glory and the tyrant's lust of power, on the other 
childish innocence and the industry of the servant — all 
these pictures enliven his discourse and make it clear 
even to those who are children in mind. 

They do more than tell us that he spoke in 
picture and parable. They exhibit an inner free- 
dom and a cheerfulness of soul in the midst 
of the greatest strain, such as no prophet ever 
possessed before him. His eye rests kindly upon 
the flowers and the children, on the lily of the field 
— "Solomon in all his glory is not clothed like one 
of them " — on the birds in the air and the sparrows 
on the house-top. The sphere in which he lived, 
above the earth and its concerns, did not destroy 
his interest in it ; no ! he brought everything in it 



4° What is Christianity ? 

into relation with the God whom he knew, and he 
saw it as protected in Him : " Your Father in heaven 
feeds them." The parable is his most familiar form 
of speech. Insensibly, however, parable and sym- 
pathy pass into each other. Yet he who had not 
where to lay his head does not speak like one who 
has broken with everything, or like an heroic peni- 
tent, or like an ecstatic prophet, but like a man who 
has rest and peace for his soul, and is able to give 
life and strength to others. He strikes the mighti- 
est notes ; he offers men an inexorable alternative ; 
he leaves them no escape; and yet the strongest 
emotion seems to come naturally to him, and he 
expresses it as something natural ; he clothes it in 
the language in which a mother speaks to her child. 



LECTURE III 

IN the previous lecture we spoke of our evangel- 
ists and of their silence on the subject of Jesus' 
early development. We described in brief the 
mode and character of his teaching. We saw that 
he spoke like a prophet, and yet not like a prophet. 
His words breathe peace, joy and certainty. He 
urges the necessity of struggle and decision — 
" where your treasure is, there will your heart be 
also ** — and yet the quiet symmetry of a parable is 
over all that he says : under God's sun and the dew 
of heaven everything is to grow and increase until 
the harvest. He lived in the continual conscious- 
ness of God's presence. His food and drink was 
to do God's will. But — and this seemed to us the 
greatest thing about him and the seal of his inner 
freedom — he did not speak like an heroic penitent, 
or like an ascetic who has turned his back upon the 
world. His eye rested kindly upon the whole 
world, and he saw it as it was, in all its varied and 
changing colours. He ennobled it in his parables; 
his gaze penetrated the veil of the earthly, and he 
recognised everywhere the hand of the living God. 

41 



42 What is Christianity ? 

When he came forward, another was already at 
work among the Jewish people : John the Baptist. 
Within a few months a great movement had arisen 
on the banks of the Jordan. It differed altogether 
from those messianic movements which for several 
generations had by fits and starts kept the nation 
alive. The Baptist, it is true, also proclaimed that 
the kingdom of God was at hand ; and that meant 
nothing less than that the day of the Lord, the 
judgment, the end, was then coming. But the day 
of judgment which John the Baptist announced was 
not the day when God was going to take vengeance 
upon the heathen and raise up His own people; it 
was the day of judgment for this very people that 
he prophesied. " Who hath warned you to flee 
from the wrath to come? Think not to say within 
yourselves, We have Abraham to our father : for I 
say unto you that God is able of these stones to 
raise up children unto Abraham. And now also the 
axe is laid unto the root of the trees." In that day 
of judgment it is not being children of Abraham, 
but doing works of righteousness, which is to turn 
the scale. And he, the preacher, himself began 
with repentance and devoted his life to it ; he stands 
before them in raiment of camel's hair, and his meat 
is locusts and wild honey. But it is not in the levy- 
ing of a band of ascetics that he sees his work, or 
at any rate his main work. He appeals to the 



John the Baptist 43 

whole nation, busy with its various trades and call- 
ings, and summons it to repentance. They seem 
very simple truths that he utters : to the publicans 
he says: "Exact no more than that which is ap- 
pointed you " ; to the soldiers: "Do violence to no 
man, neither accuse any falsely, and be content 
with your wages"; to the well-to-do: "He that 
hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath 
none, and he that hath meat, let him do likewise " ; 
and to all: "Forget not the poor." This is the 
practical proof of the repentance to which he calls, 
and it embraces the conversion which he has in 
view. It is not a question of a single act, the bap- 
tism of repentance, but of a righteous life in the 
face of the avenging justice of God. Of ceremonies, 
sacrifices, and the works of the law, John did not 
speak; apparently he thought them unimportant. 
It was on a right disposition and good deeds that 
everything turned. In the day of judgment it was 
by this standard that the God of Abraham would 
judge. 

Let us pause here for a moment. Questions force 
themselves upon us at this point which have often 
been answered and still are again and again put. It 
is clear that John the Baptist proclaimed the sov- 
ereignty of God and His holy moral law. It is also 
clear that he proclaimed to his fellow-countrymen 
that it was by the moral law that they were to 



44 What is Christianity ? 

measure, and that on this alone everything was to 
turn. He told them that what they were to care 
about most was to be in a right state within and to 
do good deeds. It is clear, lastly, that there is no- 
thing over-refined or artificial in his notion of what 
was good ; he means ordinary morality. It is here 
that the questions arise. 

Firstly: if it was only so simple a matter as the 
eternal claims of what is right and holy, why all this 
apparatus about the coming of the day of judgment, 
about the axe being laid to the root of the trees, 
about the unquenchable fire, and so on? 

Secondly: is not this baptism in the wilderness 
and this proclamation that the day of judgment was 
at hand simply the reflection or the product of the 
political and social state of the nation at the time ? 

Thirdly : what is there that is really new in this 
proclamation and had not been already expressed 
in Judaism? 

These three questions are very intimately con- 
nected with one another. 

Firstly, then, as to the whole dramatic eschato- 
logical apparatus about the coming of the kingdom 
of God, the end being at hand, and so on. Well, 
every time that a man earnestly, and out of the 
depths of his own personal experience, points others 
to God and to what is good and holy, whether it be 
deliverance or judgment that he preaches, it has 



John the Baptist 45 

always, so far as history tells us, taken the form of 
announcing that the end is at hand. How is that 
to be explained ? The answer is not difficult. Not 
only is religion a life in and with God; but, just be- 
cause it is that, it is also the revelation of the mean- 
ing and responsibility of life. Everyone who has 
awakened to a sense of religion perceives that, with- 
out it, the search for such meaning is in vain, and 
that the individual, as well as the multitude, wan- 
ders aimlessly and falls: n they go astray; everyone 
turns to his own way." But the prophet who has 
become conscious of God is filled with terror and 
agony as he recognises that all mankind is sunk in 
error and indifference. He feels like a traveller 
who sees his companions blindly rushing to the 
edge of a precipice. He wants to call them back at 
all costs. The time is running out; he can still 
warn them; he can still adjure them to turn back; 
in a single hour, perhaps, all will be lost. The time 
is running out, it is the last moment — this is the cry 
in which, then, in all nations and at all times, any 
energetic call to conversion has been voiced when- 
ever a fresh prophet has been granted them. The 
prophet's gaze penetrates the course of history; 
he sees the irrevocable end; and he is filled 
with boundless astonishment that the godlessness 
and blindness, the frivolity and indolence, have not 
long since brought everything to utter ruin and 



46 What is Christianity ? 

destruction. That there is still a brief moment 
left in which conversion is possible seems to him 
the greatest marvel of all, and to be ascribed only 
to God's forbearance. But certain it is that the end 
cannot be very far off. This is the way in which 
with every great cry for repentance the idea of the 
approaching end always arises. The individual 
forms in which it shapes itself depend upon con- 
temporary circumstances and are of subordinate 
importance. It is only the religion which has been 
built up into an intellectual system that does not 
make this emphasising of the end all-important; 
without such emphasis no actual religion is conceiv- 
able, whether it springs up anew like a sudden flame 
or glows in the soul like a secret fire. 

I pass now to the second question : whether the 
social and political conditions of the time were not 
causes of the religious movement. Let us see 
briefly where we are. You are aware that at the 
time of which we speak the peaceful days of the 
Jewish theocracy were long past. For two cent- 
uries blow had followed upon blow ; from the ter- 
rible days of Antiochus Epiphanes onwards the 
nation had never had any rest. The kingdom of 
the Maccabees had been set up, and through inner 
strife and external foe had soon disappeared again. 
The Romans had invaded the country and had laid 
their iron hand upon everything. The tyranny of 



John the Baptist 47 

that Edomite parvenu, King Herod, had robbed the 
nation of every pleasure in life and maimed it in all 
its members. So far as human foresight went, it 
looked as if no improvement in its position could 
ever again be effected ; the lie seemed to be given 
to all the glorious old prophecies ; the end appeared 
to have come. How easy it was at such an epoch to 
despair of all earthly things, and in this despair to 
renounce in utter distress what had once passed 
as the inseparable accompaniment of the theocracy. 
How easy it was now to declare the earthly crown, 
political possessions, prestige and wealth, strenuous 
effort and struggle, to be one and all worthless, and 
in place of them to look to heaven for a completely 
new kingdom, a kingdom for the poor, the op- 
pressed, the weak, and to hope that their virtues of 
gentleness and patience would receive a crown. 
And if for hundreds of years the national God of 
Israel had been undergoing a transformation ; if He 
had broken in pieces the weapons of the mighty, 
and derided the showy worship of His priests ; if He 
had demanded righteous judgment and mercy — 
what a temptation there was to proclaim Him as the 
God who wills to see His people in misery that He 
may then bring them deliverance ! We can, in fact, 
with a few touches construct the religion and its 
hopes which seemed of necessity to result from the 
circumstances of the time — a miserabilism which 



4-8 What is Christianity ? 

/ clings to the expectation of a miraculous interfer- 
/ ence on God's part, and in the meantime, as it 
I were, wallows in wretchedness. 

"'But although the terrible circumstances of the 
time certainly disengaged and developed many 
ideas of this kind, and easily account for the wild 
enterprises of the false Messiahs and the political 
efforts of fanatical Pharisees, they are very far from 
being sufficient to explain John the Baptist's mes- 
sage. They do, indeed, explain how it was that 
deliverance from earthly things was an idea which 
seized hold of wide circles, and that people were 
looking to God. Trouble makes men pray. But 
trouble in itself does not give any moral force, and 
moral force was the chief element in John the Bap- 
tist's message. In appealing to it, in proclaiming 
that everything must be based on morality and per- 
sonal responsibility, he took a higher point of view 
than the feeble piety of the " poor," and drew not 
from time but from eternity. 

It is scarcely a century since Fichte delivered his 
memorable orations here in Berlin, after the terrible 
defeat which Germany had suffered. What did he 
do in these lectures ? In the first place, he held up 
a mirror to the nation, and showed it its sins and 
their consequences, — frivolity, godlessness, self- 
complacency, infatuation, weakness. What did he 
do next? Did he simply call them to arms? Arms 



John the Baptist 49 

were just what they were no longer capable of bear- 
ing; they had been struck from their powerless 
hands. It was to repentance and to inward conver- 
sion that he called them ; to God, and therefore to 
the exertion of all their moral force ; to truth and 
to the Spirit, so that by the Spirit everything might 
be made new. By his powerful personality, and in 
union with friends of a like mind, he produced an 
immense impression. He succeeded in opening up 
once more the choked fountains of our energy, be- 
cause he knew the strength from which help comes 
and had drunk of the living water himself. No 
doubt the necessities of the time taught him and 
steeled him ; but it would be foolish and ridiculous 
to maintain that Fichte's orations were the product 
of the general woe. They are the antithesis of it. 
Not otherwise must we think of John the Baptist's 
message, and — let me say it at once — of the mes- 
sage which Jesus himself delivered. That they ap- 
pealed to those who expected nothing of the world 
or of politics — of John the Baptist, however, this is 
not directly reported ; that they would have no- 
thing to do with those popular leaders who had led 
the people to ruin ; that they turned their gaze al- 
together from earthly things, may also be accounted 
for by the circumstances of the time. But the 
remedy which they proclaimed was no product of 

those circumstances. Nay, was not calling people 
4 



5° What is Christianity ? 

to ordinary morality and expecting everything of it 
bound to seem a hopeless enterprise? And whence 
came the power, the inflexible power, which com- 
pelled others? This leads us to the last of the ques- 
tions which we have raised. 

Thirdly, what was there that was new in the 
whole movement? Was it anything new to set up 
the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of the good 
and the holy, in opposition to all the other elements 
which had forced their way into religion? Did John 
the Baptist, did Christ himself, bring in anything 
that had not been proclaimed long before ? Gentle- 
men, the question as to what is new in religion is 
not a question which is raised by those who live in 
it. What is there that can have been " new," see- 
ing that mankind existed so long before Jesus 
Christ and had seen so much in the way of intelli- 
gence and knowledge? Monotheism had long been 
introduced, and the few possible types of mono- 
theistic religious fervour had long made their ap- 
pearance here and there, and had taken possession 
of whole schools, nay, of a whole nation. Can the 
religious individualism of that Psalmist ever be sur- 
passed in depth and vigour who confessed: " Lord, 
when I have thee, I ask not after heaven and 
earth"? Can we go beyond what Micah said: 
" He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and 
what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly 



y 



John the Baptist 51 

and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 
God"? Centuries had passed since these words^^^ 
were spoken. "What do you want with your \ 
Christ?" we are asked, principally by Jewish 
scholars; " he introduced nothing new." I answer 
with Wellhausen : It is quite true that what Jesus 
proclaimed, what John the Baptist expressed be- 
fore him in his exhortations to repentance, was also 
to be found in the prophets, and even in the Jewish 
tradition of their time. The Pharisees themselves 
were in possession of it; but unfortunately they 
were in possession of much else besides. With 
them it was weighted, darkened, distorted, rendered 
ineffective and deprived of its force, by a thousand 
things which they also held to be religious and 
every whit as important as mercy and judgment. 
They reduced everything to one dead level, wove 
everything into one fabric ; the good and holy was 
only one woof in a broad earthly warp. You ask 
again, then: 'What was there that was new?" 
The question is out of place in monotheistic re- 
ligion. Ask rather: " Had what was here pro- 
claimed any strength and any vigour?" I answer: 
Take the people of Israel and search the whole his- 
tory of their religion ; take history generally, and 
where will you find any message about God and the 
good that was ever so pure and so full of strength 
— for purity and strength go together — as we hear 



52 What is Christianity ? 

and read of in the Gospels ? As regards purity, the 
spring of holiness had, indeed, long been opened; 
but it was choked with sand and dirt, and its water 
was polluted. For rabbis and theologians to come 
afterwards and distil this water, even if they were 
successful, makes no difference. But now the 
spring burst forth afresh, and broke a new way for 
itself through the rubbish — through the rubbish 
which priests and theologians had heaped up so as 
to smother the true element in religion; for how 
often does it happen in history that theology is 
only the instrument by which religion is discarded ! 
The other element was that of strength. Phari- 
saical teachers had proclaimed that everything was 
contained in the injunction to love God and one's 
neighbour. They spoke excellently; the words 
might have come out of Jesus' mouth. But what 
was the result of their language? That the nation, 
that in particular their own pupils, condemned the 
man who took the words seriously. All that they 
did was weak and, because weak, harmful. Words 
effect nothing; it is the power of the personality 
that stands behind them. But he " taught as one 
having authority and not as the Scribes." Such 
was the impression of him which his disciples re- 
ceived. His words became to them "the words of 
life," seeds which sprang up and bore fruit. That 



Jesus' Message 53 

Some such message John the Baptist had already 
begun to deliver. He, too, had undoubtedly placed 
himself in opposition to the leaders of the people ; 
for any man who tells people to " reform," and at 
the same time enjoins nothing more than repent- 
ance and good works, always comes into opposition 
with the official leaders of religion and church. But 
beyond the lines of the message of repentance John 
did not go. 

Jesus Christ then appeared. He first of all ac- 
cepted and affirmed the Baptist's message to its full 
extent, and he acknowledged the Baptist himself; 
nay, there was no one of whom he spoke in lan- 
guage of such warm recognition. Did not he say 
that among them that were born of women there 
had not arisen a greater than John the Baptist? 
Again and again he acknowledged that his cause 
began with the Baptist and that he was his forerun- 
ner. Nay, he had himself been baptised by him, 
and thereby put himself into the movement which 
the Baptist began. 

But he did not rest there. When he appeared, 
he, too, it is true, like John proclaimed: " Repent, 
for the kingdom of God is at hand " ; but his mes- 
sage became one of joy as he delivered it. The 
traditions about him contain nothing more certain 
than that his message was an "evangel," and that 
it was felt to bring blessing and joy. With good 



54 What is Christianity ? 

reason, therefore, the evangelist Luke began his 
narrative of Jesus' public appearance with the words 
of the prophet Isaiah : — ' ' The Spirit of the Lord is 
upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the 
gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken- 
hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and re- 
covering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them 
that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the 
Lord." Or in Jesus' own words: — "Come unto me 
all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give 
you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; 
for 1 am meek and lowly of heart; and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my 
burden is light.'* These words dominated Jesus' 
whole work and message ; they contain the theme 
of all that he taught and did. They make it at once 
obvious that in this teaching of his he left John the 
Baptist's message far behind. The latter, although 
already in silent conflict with the priests and the 
scribes, did not become a definite signal for contra- 
diction. " The falling and the rising again," a new 
humanity opposed to the old, men of God — these 
Jesus Christ was the first to create. He came into 
immediate opposition with the official leaders of the 
people, and in them with ordinary human nature in 
general. They thought of God as of a despot 
guarding the ceremonial observances in His house- 
hold ; he breathed in the presence of God. They 



Jesus' Message 55 

saw Him only in His law, which they had converted 
into a labyrinth of dark defiles, blind alleys, and 
secret passages; he saw and felt Him everywhere. 
They were in possession of a thousand of His com- 
mandments, and thought, therefore, that they knew 
Him ; he had one only, and knew Him by it. They 
had made this religion into an earthly trade, and 
there was nothing more detestable ; he proclaimed 
the living God and the soul's nobility. 

If, however, we take a general view of Jesus' teach- 
ing, we shall see that it may be grouped under three 
heads. They are each of such a nature as to con- 
tain the whole, and hence it can be exhibited in its 
entirety under any one of them. 

Firstly, the kingdom of God and its coming. 

Secondly, God the Father and the infinite value of 
the human soul. 

Thirdly, the higher righteousness and the com- 
mandment of love. 

That Jesus' message is so great and so powerful 
lies in the fact that it is so simple and on the other 
hand so rich ; so simple as to be exhausted in each 
of the leading thoughts which he uttered; so rich 
that every one of these thoughts seems to be inex- 
haustible and the full meaning of the sayings and 
parables beyond our reach. But more than that — 
he himself stands behind everything that he said. 
His words speak to us across the centuries with the 



56 What is Christianity ? 

freshness of the present. It is here that that pro- 
found saying is truly verified: " Speak, that I may 
see thee." 

Our course in what follows will be to try to learn 
what those three heads are, and to classify the 
thoughts which come under them. They contain 
the main features of Jesus' message. We shall then 
try to understand the Gospel in its relations to cer- 
tain great questions of life. 

I. — The kingdom of God and its coming. 

Jesus' message of the kingdom of God runs 
through all the forms and statements of the 
prophecy which, taking its colour from the Old 
Testament, announces the day of judgment and the 
visible government of God in the future, up to the 
idea of an inward coming of the kingdom, starting 
with Jesus' message and then beginning. His mes- 
sage embraces these two poles, with many stages 
between them that shade off one into another. At 
the one pole the coming of the kingdom seems to 
be a purely future event, and the kingdom itself to 
be the external rule of God; at the other, it appears 
as something inward, something which is already 
present and making its entrance at the moment. 
You see, therefore, that neither the conception of 
the kingdom of God, nor the way in which its com- 
ing is represented, is free from ambiguity. Jesus 



The Kingdom of God 57 

took it from the religious traditions of his nation, 
where it already occupied a foremost place; he ac- 
cepted various aspects of it in which the conception 
was still a living force, and he added new ones. 
Eudemonistic expectations of a mundane and po- 
litical character were all that he discarded. 

Jesus, like all those of his own nation who were 
really in earnest, was profoundly conscious of the 
great antithesis between the kingdom of God and 
that kingdom of the world in which he saw the 
reign of evil and the evil one. This was no mere 
image or empty idea; it was a truth which he saw 
and felt most vividly. He was certain, then, that 
the kingdom of the world must perish and be de- 
stroyed. But nothing short of a battle can effect it. 
With dramatic intensity battle and victory stand 
like a picture before his soul, drawn in those large 
firm lines in which the prophets had seen them. 
At the close of the drama he sees himself seated at 
the right hand of his Father, and his twelve disciples 
on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel; so 
objective was this picture to him, so completely in 
harmony with the ideas of his time. Now we may 
take the view — and not a few of us take it — that in 
these dramatic pictures, with their hard colours and 
contrasts, we have the actual purport of Jesus' mes- 
sage and the fundamental form which it took; and 
that all his other statements of it must be simply 



58 What is Christianity ? 

regarded as secondary. We may say that they are 
all variations of it more or less edifying, variations 
which were added, perhaps, only by later reporters ; 
but that the only positive factor is the dramatic 
hope for the future. In this view I cannot concur. 
It is considered a perverse procedure in similar 
cases to judge eminent, epoch-making personalities 
first and foremost by what they share with their 
contemporaries, and on the other hand to put what 
is great and characteristic in them into the back- 
ground. The tendency as far as possible to reduce 
everything to one level, and to efface what is special 
and individual, may spring in some minds from a 
praiseworthy sense of truth, but it has proved mis- 
leading. More frequently, however, we get the 
endeavour, conscious or unconscious, to refuse 
greatness any recognition at all, and to throw down 
anything that is exalted. There can be no doubt 
about the fact that the idea of the two kingdoms, of 
God and of the devil, and their conflicts, and of that 
last conflict at some future time when the devil, 
long since cast out of heaven, will be also defeated 
on earth, was an idea which Jesus simply shared 
with his contemporaries. He did not start it, but 
he grew up in it and he retained it. The other 
view, however, that the kingdom of God "cometh 
not with observation," that it is already here, was 
his own. 



The Kingdom of God 59 

For us, gentlemen, to-day, it is difficult to recon- 
cile, nay, it is scarcely possible to bridge over, such 
an opposition as is involved, on the one side in a 
dramatic picture of God's kingdom existing in the 
future, and on the other in the announcement that 
1 'it is in the midst of you," a still and mighty 
power in the hearts of men. But to understand 
why it was that with other historical traditions and 
other forms of culture no opposition was felt to 
exist between these views, nay, that both were able 
to exist side by side, we must reflect, we must steep 
ourselves in the history of the past. I imagine that 
a few hundred years hence there will be found to 
exist in the intellectual ideas which we shall have 
left behind us much that is contradictory ; people 
will wonder how we put up with it. They will find 
much hard and dry husk in what we took for the 
kernel ; they will be unable to understand how we 
could be so short-sighted, and fail to get a sound 
grasp of what was essential and separate it from the 
rest. Some day the knife will be applied and pieces 
will be cut away where as yet we do not feel the 
slightest inclination to distinguish. Let us hope 
that then we may find fair judges, who will measure 
our ideas not by what we have unwittingly taken 
over from tradition and are neither able nor called 
upon to correct, but by what was born of our very 
own, by the changes and improvements which we 



60 What is Christianity ? 

have effected in what was handed down to us or was 
commonly prevalent in our day. 

Truly the historian's task of distinguishing be- 
tween what is traditional and what is peculiar, 
between kernel and husk, in Jesus' message of the 
kingdom of God is a difficult and responsible one. 
How far may we go? We do not want to rob this 
message of its innate character and colour; we do 
not want to change it into a pale scheme of ethics. 
On the other hand, we do not want to lose sight of 
its peculiar character and strength, as we should do 
were we to side with those who resolve it into the 
general ideas prevailing at the time. The very way 
in which Jesus distinguished between the traditional 
elements — he left out none in which there was a 
spark of moral force, and he accepted none which 
encouraged the selfish expectations of his nation — 
this very discrimination teaches us that it was from 
a deeper knowledge that he spoke and taught. But 
we possess testimonies of a much more striking 
kind. If anyone wants to know what the kingdom 
of God and the coming of it meant in Jesus' mes- 
sage, he must read and study his parables. He will 
then see what it is that is meant. The kingdom of 
God comes by coming to the individual, by enter- 
ing into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the 
kingdom of God is the rule of God ; but it is the 
rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals ; it 



The Kingdom of God 61 

is God Himself in His power. From this point of view 
everything that is dramatic in the external and his- 
torical sense has vanished ; and gone, too, are all 
the external hopes for the future. Take whatever 
parable you will, the parable of the sower, of the 
pearl of great price, of the treasure buried in the 
field — the word of God, God Himself, is the king- 
dom. It is not a question of angels and devils, 
thrones and principalities, but of God and the soul, 
the soul and its God. 



LECTURE IV 

WE last spoke of Jesus' message in so far as it 
proclaimed the kingdom of God and its 
coming. We saw that it runs through all the forms 
in which the prophecy of the day of judgment is 
expressed in the Old Testament, up to the idea of 
an inward coming of the kingdom then beginning. 
Finally we tried to show why the latter idea is to 
be regarded as the dominant one. Before examin- 
ing it more closely, however, I should like to draw 
your attention to two particularly important ex- 
pressions of it, lying between the extremes of the 
"day of judgment " and the "inner coming." 

In the first of them, the coming of the kingdom 
of God signifies that the kingdom of the devil is de- 
stroyed and the demons vanquished. Hitherto it is 
they who have been ruling ; they have taken pos- 
session of men and even of whole nations, and 
forced them to their will. Jesus not only declares 
that he is come to destroy the works of the devil, 
but he actually drives out the demons and releases 
men from their power. 

Let me here digress a little from our subject. 
62 



The Kingdom of God 63 

Nothing in the Gospels strikes us as stranger than 
the frequently recurring stories of demons, and the 
great importance which the evangelists attach to 
them. For many among us the very fact that these 
writings report such absurdities is sufficient reason 
for declining to accept them. Now in this con- 
nexion it is well to know that absolutely similar 
stories are to be found in numerous writings of that 
age, Greek, Roman, and Jewish. The notion of 
people being " possessed " was current everywhere; 
nay, even the science of the time looked upon a 
whole section of morbid phenomena in this light. 
But the consequence of these phenomena being ex- 
plained as meaning that some evil and invisible 
power had taken possession of a man was that men- 
tal affections took forms which looked as if an alien 
being had really entered into the soul. There is 
nothing paradoxical in this. If modern science were 
to declare nervous disease to consist, in great part, 
of " possession," and the newspapers were to spread 
this announcement amongst the public, the same 
thing would recur. We should soon have numer- 
ous cases in which nervous patients looked as if they 
were in the grip of an evil spirit and themselves be- 
lieved that they were so. Theory and belief would 
work by suggestion and again create a class of "de- 
moniacs " amongst the insane, just as they created 
them hundreds, nay, thousands, of years ago. It is 



64 What is Christianity ? 

unhistorical and foolish to attribute any peculiar 
notion or "theory" about demons and the de- 
moniac to the Gospels and the evangelists. They 
only shared the general notions of their time. The 
forms of mental disease in question are of rare oc- 
currence nowadays, but nevertheless they are not 
yet quite extinct. Where they occur the best 
means of encountering them is to-day, as it was 
formerly, the influence of a strong personality. It 
manages to threaten and subdue the "devil" and 
so heal the patient. In Palestine "demoniacs" 
must have been particularly numerous. Jesus saw 
in them the forces of evil and mischief, and by his 
marvellous power over the souls of those who 
trusted him he banished the disease. This brings 
us to the second point. 

When John the Baptist in prison was disturbed 
by doubts as to whether Jesus was " he who was to 
come," he sent two of his own disciples to him to 
ask him himself. There is nothing more touching 
than this question of the Baptist's, nothing more 
edifying than the Lord's answer. But we will not 
dwell upon the scene. What was the answer? 
"Go and shew John again those things which you 
do hear and see : the blind receive their sight, and 
the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf 
hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the 
Gospel preached to them." That is what the 



The Kingdom of God 65 

"coming of the kingdom" means, or, rather, it is 
there already in this saving activity. By vanquish- 
ing and banishing misery, need and disease, by the 
actual influence which Jesus was exerting, John was 
to see that a new day had dawned. The healing 
of the possessed was only a part of this saving ac- 
tivity ; the activity itself, however, was what Jesus 
denoted as the meaning and the seal of his mission. 
It was, then, to the wretched, to the sick, and to 
the poor, that he addressed himself; but not as a 
moralist and without any trace of weak-minded 
sentimentality. He makes no division of evils into 
departments and groups ; he spends no time in ask- 
ing whether the sick one " deserves " to be healed ; 
he is far, too, from having any sympathy for pain 
and death. He nowhere says that disease is salu- 
tary and that evil is a blessing. No ! disease he 
calls disease, and health he calls health. To him all 
evil, all misery, is something terrible ; it is part of 
the great realm of Satan. But he feels the power 
of the Saviour within him. He knows that progress 
is possible only by overcoming weakness and heal- 
ing disease. 

But he goes further. It is by his healing, above 
all by his forgiving sin, that the kingdom of God 
comes. This is the first complete transition to the 
conception of the kingdom of God as the power that 

works inwardly. As he calls the sick and the poor 
5 



66 What is Christianity ? 

to him, so he calls sinners also, and it is this call 
which is all-important. " The Son of Man is come 
to seek and to save that which was lost." Here for 
the first time everything that is external and merely 
future is abandoned: it is the individual, not the 
nation or the state, which is redeemed ; it is new 
men who are to arise, and the kingdom of God is to 
be at once their strength and the goal at which 
they aim. They search for the treasure hidden in 
the field and find it ; they sell all that they have and 
buy the pearl of great price ; they are converted and 
become as children ; but thereby they are redeemed 
and made God's children and God's champions. 

It was in this connexion that Jesus spoke of the 
kingdom of God which the violent take by force, 
and, again, of the kingdom of God which grows 
steadily and silently like a seed and bears fruit. It 
is in the nature of spiritual force, a power which 
sinks into a man within, and can be understood only 
from within. Thus, although the kingdom is also 
in heaven ; although it will come with the day of 
judgment, he can still say of it: "It is not here or 
there, it is within you." 

At a later period the view of the kingdom, ac- 
cording to which it was already come and still 
comes in Jesus' saving activity, was not kept up by 
his disciples : nay, they continued to speak of it as 
of something that was solely in the future. But the 



The Kingdom of God 67 

thing itself retained its force ; it was only given an- 
other title. It underwent the same experience as 
the conception of the " Messiah." As we shall see 
hereafter, there was scarcely anyone in the Church 
of the Gentiles who sought to explain Jesus' signifi- 
cance by regarding him as the "Messiah." But 
the thing itself did not perish. 

The essential elements in the message of the 
kingdom were preserved. The kingdom has a 
triple meaning. Firstly, it is something supernat- 
ural, a gift from above, not a product of ordinary 
life. Secondly, it is a purely religious blessing, the 
inner link with the living God ; thirdly, it is the 
most important experience that a man can have, 
that on which everything else depends; it perme- 
ates and dominates his whole existence, because sin 
is forgiven and misery banished. 

This kingdom, which comes to the humble and 
makes them new men and joyful, is the key that 
first unlocks the meaning and the aim of life. This 
was what Jesus himself found, and what his dis- 
ciples found. It is a supernatural element alone 
that ever enables us to get at the meaning of life ; 
for natural existence ends in death. But a life that 
is bound up with death can have no meaning; it is 
only sophisms that can blind us to this fact. But 
here the kingdom of God, the Eternal, entered into 
time. "Eternal light came in and made the world 



68 What is Christianity ? 

look new." This is Jesus' message of the kingdom. 
Everything else that he proclaimed can be brought 
into connexion with this; his whole " doctrine" 
can be conceived as a message of the kingdom. 
But we shall recognise this, and the blessing which 
he means, still more clearly, if we turn to the sec- 
ond of the sections indicated in the previous lec- 
ture, and thereby progressively acquaint ourselves 
with the fundamental features of Jesus' message. 

II. — God the Father and the infinite value of the 
human soul. 

To our modern way of thinking and feeling, 
Christ's message appears in the clearest and most 
direct light when grasped in connexion with the 
idea of God the Father and the infinite value of the 
human soul. Here the elements which I would de- 
scribe as the restful and restgiving in Jesus' mes- 
sage, and which are comprehended in the idea of 
our being children of God, find expression. I call 
them restful in contrast with the impulsive and stir- 
ring elements; although it is just they that are in- 
formed with a special strength. But the fact that 
the whole of Jesus' message may be reduced to 
these two heads — God as the Father, and the human 
soul so ennobled that it can and does unite with him 
— shows us that the Gospel is in nowise a positive 
religion like the rest; that it contains no statutory 



God the Father 69 

or particularistic elements; that it is, therefore, re- 
ligion itself. It is superior to all antithesis and 
tension between this world and a world to come, 
between reason and ecstasy, between work and iso- 
lation from the world, between Judaism and Hel- 
lenism. It can dominate them all, and there is no 
factor of earthly life to which it is confined or 
necessarily tied down. Let us, however, get a 
clearer idea of what being children of God, in Jesus' 
sense, means, by briefly considering four groups 
containing sayings of his, or, as the case may be, a 
single saying, viz. : — (i) The Lord's Prayer; (2) that 
utterance, "Rejoice not that the spirits are subject 
unto you ; but rather rejoice because your names 
are written in heaven"; (3) the saying, "Are not 
two sparrows sold for a farthing ? and one of them 
shall not fall on the ground without your Father. 
But the very hairs of your head are all numbered " ; 
(4) the utterance, "What shall it profit a man if he 
shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul " ? 
Let us take the Lord's Prayer first. It was com- 
municated by Jesus to his disciples at a particularly 
solemn moment. They had asked him to teach 
them how to pray, as John the Baptist had taught 
his disciples. Thereupon he uttered the Lord's 
Prayer. It is by their prayers that the character of 
the higher religions is determined. But this prayer 
was spoken — as everyone must feel who has ever 



70 What is Christianity ? 

given it a thought in his soul — by one who has 
overcome all inner unrest, or overcomes it the mo- 
ment that he goes before God. The very apos- 
trophe of the prayer, "Our Father," exhibits the 
steady faith of the man who knows that he is safe 
in God, and it tells us that he is certain of being 
heard. Not to hurl violent desires at heaven or to 
obtain this or that earthly blessing does he pray, 
but to preserve the power which he already pos- 
sesses and strengthen the union with God in which 
he lives. No one, then, can utter this prayer unless 
his heart is in profound peace and his mind wholly 
concentrated on the inner relation of the soul with 
God. All other prayers are of a lower order, for 
they contain particularistic elements, or are so 
framed that in some way or other they stir the im- 
agination in regard to the things of sense as well ; 
whilst this prayer leads us away from everything 
to the height where the soul is alone with its God. 
And yet the earthly element is not absent. The 
whole of the second half of the prayer deals with 
earthly relations, but they are placed in the light of 
the Eternal. In vain will you look for any request 
for particular gifts of grace, or special blessings, 
even of a spiritual kind. "All else shall be added 
unto you." The name of God, His will, and His 
kingdom — these elements of rest and permanence 
are poured out over the earthly relations as well. 



God the Father 71 

Everything that is small and selfish melts away, and 
only four things are left with regard to which it is 
worth while to pray — the daily bread, the daily 
trespass, the daily temptations, and the evil in life. 
There is nothing in the Gospels that tells us more 
certainly what the Gospel is, and what sort of dis- 
position and temper it produces, than the Lord's 
Prayer. With this prayer we ought also to confront 
all those who disparage the Gospel by representing 
it as an ascetic or ecstatic or sociological pronounce- 
ment. It shows the Gospel to be the Fatherhood 
of God applied to the whole of life ; to be an inner 
union with God's will and God's kingdom, and a 
joyous certainty of the possession of eternal bless- 
ings and protection from evil. 

As to the second utterance: when Jesus says 
" Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, 
but rejoice rather that your names are written in 
heaven," it is another way of laying special empha- 
sis on the idea that the all-important element in 
this religion is the consciousness of being safe in 
God. The greatest achievements, nay, the very 
works which are done in the strength of this re- 
ligion, fall below the assurance, at once humble and 
proud, of resting for time and eternity under the 
fatherly care of God. Moreover, the genuineness, 
nay, the actual existence, of religious experience is 
to be measured, not by any transcendency of feeling 



72 What is Christianity ? 

nor by great deeds that all men can see, but by the 
joy and the peace which are diffused through the 
soul that can say "My Father." 

How far did Christ carry this idea of the fatherly 
providence of God? Here we come to the third 
saying: "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? 
and one of them shall not fall to the ground with- 
out your Father. But the very hairs of your head 
are alt numbered." The assurance that God rules 
is to go as far as our fears go, nay, as far as life 
itself — life down even to its smallest manifestations 
in the order of Nature. It was to disabuse his dis- 
ciples of the fear of evil and the terrors of death 
that he gave them the sayings about the sparrows 
and the flowers of the field ; they are to learn how 
to see the hand of the living God everywhere in life, 
and in death too. 

Finally, in asking — and after what has gone be- 
fore the question will not sound surprising — "What 
shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world 
and lose his own soul ? " he put a man's value as 
high as it can be put. The man who can say "My 
Father" to the Being who rules heaven and earth, 
is thereby raised above heaven and earth, and him- 
self has a value which is higher than all the fabric 
of this world. But this great saying took the stern 
tone of a warning. He offered them a gift and with 
it set them a task. How different was the Greek 



God the Father 7$ 

doctrine! Plato, it is true, had already sung the 
great hymn of the mind ; he had distinguished it 
from the whole world of appearance and maintained 
its eternal origin. But the mind which he meant 
was the knowing mind ; he contrasted it with blind, 
insensible matter; his message made its appeal to 
the wise. Jesus Christ calls to every poor soul ; he 
calls to everyone who bears a human face : You are 
children of the living God, and not only better than 
many sparrows but of more value than the whole 
world. The value of a truly great man, as I saw it 
put lately, consists in his increasing the value of all 
mankind. It is here, truly, that the highest signifi- 
cance of great men lies : to have enhanced, that is, 
to have progressively given effect to human value r 
to the value of that race of men which has risen up 
out of the dull ground of Nature. But Jesus Christ 
was the first to bring the value of every human soul 
to light, and what he did no one can any more 
undo. We may take up what relation to him we 
will : in the history of the past no one can refuse to 
recognise that it was he who raised humanity to 
this level. 

This highest estimate of a man's value is based 
on a transvaluation of all values. To the man who 
boasts of his possessions he says: "Thou fool." 
He confronts everyone with the thought: "Who- 
soever will lose his life shall save it." He can even 



74 What is Christianity ? 

say: " He that hateth his life in this world shall 
keep it unto life eternal." This is the transvalua- 
tion of values of which many before him had a dim 
idea; of which they perceived the truth as through 
a veil ; the redeeming power of which — that blessed 
mystery — they felt in advance. He was the first 
to give it calm, simple, and fearless expression, as 
though it were a truth which grew on every tree. 
It was just this that stamped his peculiar genius, 
that he gave perfectly simple expression to pro- 
found and all-important truths, as though they 
could not be otherwise ; as though he were uttering 
something that was self-evident ; as though he were 
only reminding men of what they all know already, 
because it lives in the innermost part of their souls. 
In the combination of these ideas — God the 
Father, Providence, the position of men as God's 
children, the infinite value of the human soul — the 
whole Gospel is expressed. But we must recognise 
what a paradox it all is ; nay, that the paradox of 
religion here for the first time finds its full expres- 
sion. Measured by the experience of the senses 
and by exact knowledge, not only are the different 
religions a paradox, but so are all religious phe- 
nomena. They introduce an element, and pro- 
nounce it to be the most important of all, which is 
not cognisable by the senses and flies in the face of 
things as they are actually constituted. But all re- 



God the Father 75 

ligions other than Christianity are in some way or 
other so bound up with the things of the world that 
they involve an element of earthly advantage, or, as 
the case may be, are akin in their substance to the 
intellectual and spiritual condition of a definite 
epoch. But what can be less obvious than the 
statement : the hairs of your head are all numbered ; 
you have a supernatural value; you can put your- 
selves into the hands of a power which no one has 
seen? Either that is nonsense, or else it is the 
utmost development of which religion is capable; 
no longer a mere phenomenon accompanying the 
life of the senses, a coefficient, a transfiguration of 
certain parts of that life, but something which sets 
up a paramount title to be the first and the only 
fact that reveals the fundamental basis and mean- 
ing of life. Religion subordinates to itself the 
whole motley world of phenomena, and defies that 
world if it claims to be the only real one. Religion 
gives us only a single experience, but one which 
presents the world in a new light : the Eternal ap- 
pears ; time becomes means to an end ; man is seen 
to be on the side of the Eternal. This was certainly 
Jesus* meaning, and to take anything from it is to 
destroy it. In applying the idea of Providence to 
the whole of humanity and the world without any 
exception; in showing that humanity is rooted in 
the Eternal; in proclaiming the fact that we are 



76 What is Christianity ? 

God's children as at once a gift and a task, he took 
a firm grip of all fumbling and stammering attempts 
at religion and brought them to their issue. Once 
more let it be said : we may assume what position 
we will in regard to him and his message, certain 
it is that thence onward the value of our race is en- 
hanced; human lives, nay, we ourselves, have be- 
come dearer to one another. A man may know it 
or not, but a real reverence for humanity follows 
from the practical recognition of God as the Father 
of us all. 

III. — The higher righteousness and the command- 
ment of love. 

This is the third head, and the whole of the Gos- 
pel is embraced under it. To represent the Gospel 
as an ethical message is no depreciation of its value. 
The ethical system which Jesus found prevailing in 
his nation was both ample and profound. To judge 
the moral ideas of the Pharisees solely by their 
childish and casuistical aspects is not fair. By be- 
ing bound up with religious worship and petrified in 
ritual observance, the morality of holiness had, in- 
deed, been transformed into something that was the 
clean opposite of it. But all was not yet hard and 
dead; there was some life still left in the deeper 
parts of the system. To those who questioned him 
Jesus could still answer: "You have the law, keep 



The Higher Righteousness 77 

it ; you know best youselves what you have to do ; 
the sum of the law is, as you yourselves say, to love 
God and your neighbour." Nevertheless, there is 
a sphere of ethical thought which is peculiarly ex- 
pressive of Jesus' Gospel. Let us make this clear by 
citing four points. 

Firstly : Jesus severed the connexion existing in 
his day between ethics and the external forms of 
religious worship and technical observance. He 
would have absolutely nothing to do with the pur- 
poseful and self-seeking pursuit of "good works" 
in combination with the ritual of worship. He ex- 
hibited an indignant contempt for those who allow 
their neighbours, nay, even their parents, to starve, 
and on the other hand send gifts to the temple. 
He will have no compromise in the matter. Love 
and mercy are ends in themselves; they lose all 
value and are put to shame by having to be any- 
thing else than the service of one's neighbour. 

Secondly: in all questions of morality he goes 
straight to the root, that is, to the disposition and 
the intention. It is only thus that what he calls 
the "higher righteousness" can be understood. 
The "higher righteousness" is the righteousness 
that will stand when the depths of the heart are 
probed. Here, again, we have something that is 
seemingly very simple and self-evident. Yet the 
truth, as he uttered it, took the severe form: "It 



1 
1 



^ 



78 What is Christianity ? 

was said of old . . . but I say unto you." 
After all, then, the truth was something new; he 
was aware that it had never yet been expressed in 
such a consistent form and with such claims to su- 
premacy. A large portion of the so-called Sermon 
on the Mount is occupied with what he says when 
he goes in detail through the several departments of 
human relationships and human failings so as to 
bring the disposition and intention to light in each 
case, to judge a man's works by them, and on them 
to hang heaven and hell. 

Thirdly : what he freed from its connexion with 
self-seeking and ritual elements, and recognised as 
the moral principle, he reduces to one root and to 
one motive — love. He knows of no other, and love 
itself, whether it takes the form of love of one's 
neighbour or of one's enemy, or the love of the 
Samaritan, is of one kind only. It must completely 
fill the soul ; it is what remains when the soul dies 
to itself. In this sense of love is the new life al- 
ready begun. But it is always the love which serves, 
and only in this function does it exist and live. 

Fourthly : we saw that Jesus freed the moral ele- 
ment from all alien connexions, even from its alli- 
ance with the public religion. Therefore to say that 
the Gospel is a matter of ordinary morality is not to 
misunderstand him. And yet there is one all-im- 
portant point where he combines religion and mor- 



The Higher Righteousness 79 

ality. It is a point which must be felt; it is not 
easy to define. In view of the Beatitudes it may, 
perhaps, best be described as humility. Jesus made 
love and humility one. Humility is not a virtue by 
itself; but it is pure receptivity, the expression of 
inner need, the prayer for God's grace and forgive- 
ness, in a word, the opening up of the heart to God. 
In Jesus' view, this humility, which is the love of 
God of which we are capable — take, for instance, 
the parable of the Pharisee and the publican — is an 
abiding disposition towards the good, and that out 
of which everything that is good springs and grows. 
"Forgive us our trespasses even as we forgive them 
that trespass against us " is the prayer at once of 
humility and of love. This, then, is the source and 
origin of the love of one's neighbour; the poor in 
spirit and those who hunger and thirst after right- 
eousness are also the peacemakers and the merciful. 

It was in this sense that Jesus combined religion 1 
and morality, and in this sense religion may be / 
called the soul of morality, and morality the body / 
of religion. We can thus understand how it was 1 
that Jesus could place the love of God and the love I 
of one's neighbour side by side ; the love of one's 
neighbour is the only practical proof on earth of 
that love of God which is strong in humility. 

In thus expressing his message of the higher 
righteousness and the new commandment of love in 



11 



80 What is Christianity ? 

these four leading thoughts, Jesus defined the 
sphere of the ethical in a way in which no one be- 
fore him had ever defined it. But should we be 
threatened with doubts as to what he meant, we 
must steep ourselves again and again in the Beati- 
tudes of the Sermon on the Mount. They contain 
his ethics and his religion, united at the root, and 
freed from all external and particularistic elements. 



LECTURE V 

AT the close of the last lecture I referred to the 
Beatitudes, and mentioned that they exhibit 
Jesus' religion in a particularly impressive way. I 
desire to remind you of another passage which 
shows that Jesus recognised the practical proof of 
religion to consist in the exercise of neighbourly 
love and mercy. In one of his last discourses he 
spoke of the Judgment, bringing it before his 
hearers' eyes in the parable of the shepherd sepa- 
rating the sheep from the goats. The sole principle 
of separation is the question of mercy. The ques- 
tion is raised by asking whether men gave food and 
drink to Jesus himself, and visited him ; that is to 
say, it is put as a religious question. The paradox 
is then resolved in the sentence: "Inasmuch as ye 
have done it unto one of the least of these my 
brethren, ye have done it unto me." We can have 
no clearer illustration of the fact that in Jesus' view 
mercy was the quality on which everything turned, 
and that the temper in which it is exercised is the 
guarantee that a man's religious position is the right 
one. How so? Because in exercising this virtue 

8! 



82 What is Christianity ? 

men are imitating God : "Be merciful, even as your 
Father in heaven is merciful." He who exercises 
mercy exercises God's prerogative; for God's just- 
ice is not accomplished by keeping to the rule, 
"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," but is 
subject to the power of His mercy. 

Let us pause here for a moment. The history of 
religion marked an enormous advance, religion itself 
was established afresh, when through poets and 
thinkers in Greece on the one hand, and through 
the prophets in Palestine on the other, the idea of 
righteousness and a righteous God became a living 
force and transformed tradition. The gods were 
raised to a higher level and civilised ; the warlike 
and capricious Jehovah became a holy Being in 
whose court of judgment a man might trust, albeit 
in fear and trembling. The two great provinces of 
religion and morality, hitherto separated, were now 
brought into close relation; for "the Godhead is 
holy and just." It is our history that was then de- 
veloped ; for without that all-important transforma- 
tion there would be no such thing as "mankind," 
no such thing as a history of the world " in the 
higher sense. The most immediate result of this 
development may be summed up in the maxim : 
"What ye would not that men should do unto 
you, do ye also not unto them." Insufficient and 
prosaic as the rule may seem, yet, if extended so 



The Higher Righteousness 83 

as to cover all human relationships and really ob- 
served, it contains a civilising force of enormous 
strength. 

But it does not contain the ultimate step. Not 
until justice was compelled to give way to mercy, 
and the idea of brotherhood and self-sacrifice in 
the service of one's neighbour became paramount — 
another re-establishment of religion — was the last 
advance accomplished that it was possible and ne- 
cessary to make. Its maxim, "What ye would that 
men should do unto you, do ye also unto them," 
also seems prosaic; and yet rightly understood it 
leads to the summit and comprises a new method of 
apprehension, and a new way of judging one's own 
life. The thought that "he who loses his life shall 
save it," runs side by side with this maxim and 
effects a transvaluation of values, in the certainty 
that a man's true life is not tied to this span of time 
and is not rooted in material existence. 

I hope that I have thus shown, although briefly, 
that in the sphere of thought which is indicated by 
"the higher righteousness" and "the new com- 
mandment of love" Jesus' teaching is also con- 
tained in its entirety. As a matter of fact, the 
three spheres which we have distinguished — the 
kingdom of God, God as the Father and the infinite 
value of the human soul, and the higher righteous- 
ness showing itself in love — coalesce ; for ultimately 



84 What is Christianity ? 

the kingdom is nothing but the treasure which the 
soul possesses in the eternal and merciful God. It 
needs only a few touches to develop this thought 
into everything that, taking Jesus' sayings as its 
groundwork, Christendom has known and strives to 
maintain as hope, faith, and love. 

To proceed : Now that we have established the 
fundamental characteristics of Jesus' message, let us 
try, in the second place, to treat of the main bear- 
ings of the Gospel as applied to individual problems. 
There are six points or questions which call for 
special attention, as being the most important in 
themselves, and consequently felt and regarded as 
such in all ages. And although, in the course of 
the Church's history, one or other of these questions 
may have passed into the background for a decade 
or two, it has always reappeared afresh, and with 
redoubled force: — 

(i) The Gospel and the world, or the question of 
asceticism ; 

(2) The Gospel and the poor, or the social ques- 
tion ; 

(3) The Gospel and law, or the question of pub- 
lic order; 

(4) The Gospel and work, or the question of 
civilisation ; 

(5) The Gospel and the Son of God, or the Christ- 
ological question ; 



Asceticism 85 

(6) The Gospel and doctrine, or the question of 
creed. 

By these six questions — the first four hang to- 
gether, and the last two stand by themselves — I 
hope to be able to exhibit, of course only in outline, 
the most important bearings of Jesus' message. 

(1) The Gospel and the world, or the question of 
asceticism. 

There is a widespread opinion — it is dominant in 
the Catholic churches and many Protestants share 
it nowadays — that, in the last resort and in the 
most important things which it enjoins, the Gospel 
is a strictly world-shunning and ascetic creed. Some 
people proclaim this piece of intelligence with sym- 
pathy and admiration ; nay, they magnify it into 
the contention that the whole value and meaning 
of genuine Christianity, as of Buddhism, lies in its 
world-denying character. Others emphasise the 
world-shunning doctrines of the Gospel in order 
thereby to expose its incompatibility with modern 
ethical principles, and to prove its uselessness as a 
religion. The Catholic churches have found a curi- 
ous way out of the difficulty and one which is, in 
reality, a product of despair. They recognise, as I 
have said, the world-denying character of the Gos- 
pel, and they teach, accordingly, that it is only in 
the form of monasticism — that is, in the " vita re- 



86 What is Christianity ? 

ligiosa" — that true Christian life finds its expression. 
But they admit a " lower" kind of Christianity 
without asceticism, as "sufficient." We will say 
nothing about this strange concession now; the 
Catholic doctrine is that it is only monks who can 
follow Christ fully. With this doctrine a great phi- 
losopher, and a still greater writer, of the nineteenth 
century, has made common cause. Schopenhauer 
extols Christianity because, and in so far as, it has 
produced great ascetics like St. Anthony or St. 
Francis ; but, beyond that, everything in the Christ- 
ian message seems to him to be useless and a 
stumbling-block. With a much deeper insight than 
Schopenhauer, and with a strength of feeling and 
power of language that carry us away, Tolstoi has 
emphasised the ascetic and world-shunning features 
of the Gospel, and erected them into a rule of ob- 
servance. That the ascetic ideal which he derives 
from the Gospel is endowed with warmth and 
strength, and includes the service of one's neigh- 
bour, is a fact which we cannot deny ; but to him, 
too, the shunning of the world is the leading char- 
acteristic of Christianity. There are thousands of 
our "educated " readers who find his stories suggest- 
ive and exciting, but who at the bottom of their 
hearts are pleased and relieved to know that Christ- 
ianity means the denial of the world ; for then they 
know very well that it does not concern them. 



Asceticism 87 

They are certain, and rightly certain, that this 
world is given them to be made the best of, within 
the bounds of its own blessings and its own regula- 
tions; and that if Christianity makes any other 
claim, it thereby shows that it is unnatural. If 
Christianity has no goal to set before this life; if it 
transfers everything to a Beyond ; if it declares all 
earthly blessings to be valueless, and points exclu- 
sively to a world-shunning and contemplative life, 
it is an offence to all energetic, nay, ultimately, to 
all true natures ; for such natures are certain that our 
faculties are given us to be employed, and that the 
earth is assigned to us to be cultivated and subdued. 
But is not the Gospel really a world-denying 
creed? Certain very well-known passages are ap- 
pealed to which do not seem to admit of any other 
interpretation: "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck 
it out and cast it from thee " ; "If thy right hand 
offend thee, cut it off"; or the answer to the rich 
young man: "Go and sell that thou hast, and give 
to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in 
heaven " ; or the saying about those who have 
made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of 
heaven's sake; or the utterance: "If any man come 
to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and 
wife, and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, 
and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." 
These and other passages seem to settle the matter, 



88 What is Christianity ? 

and to prove that the Gospel is altogether world- 
shunning and ascetic in its character. But to this 
thesis I oppose three considerations which point in 
another direction. The first is derived from the 
way in which Jesus came forward, and from his 
manner and course of life; the second is based upon 
the impression which he made upon his disciples 
and was reflected in their own lives; the third 
springs from what we said about the fundamental 
features of Jesus' message. 

i. We find in our Gospels a remarkable utterance 
by Jesus, as follows: "John came neither eating 
nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. The 
Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they 
say, Behold a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber." 
A glutton, then, and a wine-bibber was he called in 
addition to the other abusive names which were 
given him. From this it clearly follows that in his 
whole demeanour and manner of life he made an 
impression quite different from that of the preacher 
of repentance on the banks of the Jordan. To- 
wards the various fields in which asceticism had 
been traditionally practised, he must have taken up 
an attitude of indifference. We see him in the 
houses of the rich and of the poor, at meals, with 
women and amongst children; according to tradi- 
tion, even at a wedding. He allows his feet to be 
washed and his head to be anointed. Further, he 



Asceticism 89 

is glad to lodge with Mary and Martha; he does 
not ask them to leave their home. When he finds, 
to his joy, people with a firm faith, he leaves them 
in the calling and the position in which they were. 
We do not hear of his telling them to sell all and 
follow him. Apparently he thinks it possible, nay, 
fitting, that they should live unto their belief in the 
position in which God has placed them. His circle 
of disciples is not exhausted by the few whom he 
summoned directly to follow him. He finds God's 
children everywhere ; to discover them in their ob- 
scurity and to be allowed to speak to them some 
word of strength is his highest pleasure. But he 
did not organise his disciples into a band of monks, 
and he gave them no directions as to what they 
were to do and leave undone in the life of the day. 
No one who reads the Gospels with an unprejudiced 
mind, and does not pick his words, can fail to ac- 
knowledge that this free and active spirit does not 
appear to be bent under the yoke of asceticism, and 
that such words, therefore, as point in this direction 
must not be taken in a rigid sense and generalised, 
but must be regarded in a wider connexion and from 
a higher point of view. 

2. It is certain that the disciples did not under- 
stand their master to be a world-shunning ascetic. 
We shall see later what sacrifices they made for 
the Gospel and in what sense they renounced the 



9° What is Christianity ? 

world. But it is evident they did not give ascetic 
practices the chief place ; they maintained the rule 
that the labourer is worthy of his hire ; they did not 
send away their wives. We are incidentally told of 
Peter that his wife accompanied him on his mis- 
sionary journeys. Apart from what we are told of 
an attempt to institute a kind of communism in the 
congregation at Jerusalem — and we may put it 
aside, as it is not trustworthy and, moreover, bore 
no ascetic character — we find nothing in the apo- 
stolic age which suggests a community of men who 
were ascetics on principle ; on the contrary, we find 
the conviction prevailing everywhere that it is 
within the given circumstances, in the calling and 
position in which he finds himself, that a man is to 
be a Christian. How differently things developed 
in Buddhism from the very start ! 

3. The all-important consideration is the third. 
Let me remind you of what we said in regard to 
Jesus' leading thoughts. In the sphere indicated 
by trust in God, humility, the forgiveness of sins 
and the love of one's neighbour, there is no room 
for the introduction of any other maxim, least of 
all for one of a legal character. At the same time 
Jesus makes it clear in what sense the kingdom of 
God is the antithesis of the world. The man who 
associates any ascetic practice with the words 
"Take no thought," "Be merciful even as your 



Asceticism 91 

Father in heaven is merciful," and so on, and puts 
it upon the same level as those words, does not un- 
derstand the sublime character of these sayings, 
and has either lost or has never attained the feeling 
that there is a union with God in which all such 
questions as shunning the world and asceticism are 
left far behind. 

For these reasons we must decline to regard the 
Gospel as a message of world-denial. 

On the other hand, Jesus speaks of three enemies, 
and the watchword which he gives in dealing with 
them is not that we are to flee them; rather, he 
commands us to annihilate them. These three ene- 
mies are mammon, care, and selfishness. Observe 
that here there is no question of flight or denial, 
but of a battle which is to be fought until the enemy 
is annihilated ; the forces of darkness are to be over- 
thrown. By mammon he understands money and 
worldly goods in the widest sense of the word, 
worldly goods which try to gain the mastery over 
us, and make us tyrants over others ; for money is 
"compressed force." Jesus speaks of this enemy 
as if it were a person, as if it were a knight in ar- 
mour, or a king; nay, as if it were the devil himself. 
It is at this enemy that the saying, "Ye cannot 
serve two masters," is aimed. Wherever anything 
belonging to the domain of mammon is of such 
value to a man that he sets his heart upon it, that 



92 What is Christianity ? 

he trembles at the thought of losing it, that he is 
no longer willing to give it up, such a man is al- 
ready in bondage. Hence, when the Christian feels 
that this danger confronts him, he is not to treat 
with the enemy, but to fight, and not fight only 
but also destroy the mammon. Were Christ to 
preach among us to-day, he would certainly not talk 
in general terms, and say to everyone, "give away 
everything you have"; but there are thousands 
among us to whom he would so speak, and that 
there is scarcely anyone who feels compelled to ap- 
ply these sayings of the Gospel to himself is a fact 
that ought to make us suspicious. 

The second enemy is care. At first sight it may 
surprise us that Jesus should describe care as so 
terrible a foe. He ranks it with "heathenism." It 
is true that in the Lord's Prayer he also taught men 
to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread "; but 
a confident request of this kind he does not call 
care. The care which he means is that which 
makes us timorous slaves of the day and of material 
things ; the care through which bit by bit we fall a 
prey to the world. Care is to him an outrage on 
God, who preserves the very sparrows on the house- 
top ; it destroys the fundamental relation with the 
Father in heaven, the childlike trust, and thus ruins 
our inmost soul. This is also a point in regard to 
which, as in respect to mammon, we must confess 



Asceticism 93 

that we do not feel deeply and strongly enough to 
recognise the full truth of Jesus' message. But the 
question is, Who is right— he with the inexorable 
"Take no thought," or we with our debilitating 
fears ? We, too, in a measure feel that a man is not 
really free, strong, and invincible, until he has put 
aside all his cares and cast them upon God. How 
much we could accomplish and how strong we 
should be, if we did not fret. 

And then, thirdly : selfishness. It is self-denial, 
not asceticism, which Jesus requires; self-denial to 
the point of self-renunciation. "If thy right eye 
offend thee, pluck it out ; if thy right hand offend 
thee, cut it off." Wherever some desire of the 
senses gains the upper hand of you, so that you be- 
come coarse and vulgar, or in your selfishness a new 
master arises in you, you must destroy it ; not be- 
cause God has any pleasure in mutilation, but 
because you cannot otherwise preserve your better 
part. It is a hard demand. But it is not met by 
any act of general renunciation, such as monks per- 
form — the act may leave things just as they were 
before — but only by a struggle and a resolute re- 
nunciation at the critical point. 

With all these enemies, mammon, care, and self- 
ishness, what we have to exercise is self-denial, and 
therewith the relation of Christianity to asceticism 
is determined. Asceticism maintains the theory 



94 What is Christianity ? 

that all worldly blessings are in themselves of no 
value. This is not the theory to which we should 
be led if we were to go by the Gospel; "for the 
earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." But 
according to the Gospel a man is to ask : Can and 
ought I to regard property and honour, friends and 
relations as blessings, or must I put them away? If 
certain of Jesus' sayings to this effect have been 
handed down to us in a general form and were, no 
doubt, so uttered, still they must be limited by the 
whole tenor of his discourses. What the Gospel 
asks of us is solemnly to examine ourselves, to 
maintain an earnest .watch, and to destroy the 
enemy. There can be no doubt, however, that 
Jesus demanded self-denial and self-renunciation to 
a much greater extent than we like to think. 

To sum up : Ascetic in the primary meaning of 
the wOrd the Gospel is not ; for it is a message of 
trust in God, of humility, of forgiveness of sin, and 
of mercy. This is a height which nothing else can 
approach, and into this sphere nothing else can force 
its way. Further, worldly blessings are not of the 
devil but of God — "Your heavenly Father knoweth 
that ye have need of all these things ; he arrays the 
lilies of the field and feeds the fowls of the air." 
Asceticism has no place in the Gospel at all ; what 
it asks is that we should struggle against mammon, 
against care, against selfishness; what it demands 



The Social Question 95 

and disengages is love; the love that serves and is 
self-sacrificing. This struggle and this love are the 
kind of asceticism which the Gospel means, and 
whoever encumbers Jesus' message with any other 
kind fails to understand it. He fails to understand 
its grandeur and its importance ; for there is some- 
thing still more important than " giving one's body 
to be burned and bestowing all one's goods to feed 
the poor," namely, self-denial and love. 

(2) The Gospel and the poor, or the social question. 

The bearings of the Gospel in regard to the social 
question form the second point which we proposed 
to consider. It is closely akin to the first. Here 
also we encounter different views prevalent at the 
present moment, or, to be more exact, two views, 
which are mutually opposed. We are told, on the 
one hand, that the Gospel was in the main a great 
social message to the poor, and that everything else 
in it is of secondary importance — mere contempo- 
rary wrapping, ancient tradition, or new forms sup- 
plied by the first generations of Christians. Jesus, 
they say, was a great social reformer, who aimed at 
relieving the lower classes from the wretched con- 
dition in which they were languishing; he set up a 
social programme which embraced the equality of 
all men, relief from economical distress, and deliv- 
erance from misery and oppression. It is only so, 



96 What is Christianity ? 

they add, that he can be understood, and therefore 
so he was ; or perhaps — so he was, because it is only 
so that we can understand him. For years books 
and pamphlets have been written dealing with the 
Gospel in this sense; well-meant performances 
which aim at thus providing Jesus with a defence 
and a recommendation. But amongst those who 
take the Gospel to be an essentially social message 
there are also some who draw the opposite conclu- 
sion. By trying to prove that Jesus' message was 
wholly directed to bringing about an economical re- 
form, they declare the Gospel to be an entirely 
Utopian and useless programme; the view, they 
say, which Jesus took of the world was gentle, but 
also weak ; coming himself from the lower and op- 
pressed classes, he shared the suspicion entertained 
by small people of the great and the rich ; he ab- 
horred all profitable trade and business; he failed 
to understand the necessity of acquiring wealth; 
and accordingly he shaped his programme so as to 
disseminate pauperism in the "world " — to him the 
world was Palestine — and then, by way of contrast 
with the misery on earth, to build up a kingdom in 
heaven; a programme unrealisable in itself, and 
offensive to men of energy. This, or something 
like this, is the view held by another section of 
those who identify the Gospel with a social message. 
Opposed to this group of persons, united in the 



The Social Question 97 

way in which they look at the Gospel but divided in 
their opinions in regard to it, there is another group 
upon whom it makes quite a different impression. 
They assert that as for any direct interest on Jesus' 
part in the economical and social conditions of his 
age; nay, further, as for any rudimentary interest 
in economical questions in general, it is only read 
into the Gospel, and that with economical questions 
the Gospel has absolutely nothing to do. Jesus, 
they say, certainly borrowed illustrations and ex- 
amples from the domain of economics, and took 
a personal interest in the poor, the sick, and the 
miserable, but his purely religious teaching and his 
saving activity were in no way directed to any im- 
provement in their earthly position : to say that his 
objects and intentions were of a social character is 
to secularise them. Nay, there are not a few among 
us who think him, like themselves, a "Conserva- 
tive," who respected all these existing social differ- 
ences and ordinances as " divinely ordained." 

The voices which make themselves heard here 
are, as you will observe, very different, and the dif- 
ferent points of view are defended with zeal and 
pertinacity. Now, if we are to try to find the po- 
sition which corresponds to the facts, there is, first 
of all, a brief remark to be made on the age in which 
Jesus lived. Our knowledge of the social conditions 

in Palestine in his age and for some considerable 
7 



98 What is Christianity ? 

time previously does not go very far; but there are 
certain leading features of it which we can estab- 
lish, and two things more particularly which we 
can assert. 

The governing classes, to which, above all, the 
Pharisees, and also the priests, belonged — the latter 
partly in alliance with the temporal rulers — had little 
feeling for the needs of the people. The condition 
of those classes may not have been much worse than 
it generally is at all times and in all nations, but it 
was bad. Moreover, there was here the additional 
circumstance that mercy and sympathy with the 
poor had been put into the background by devotion 
to public worship and to the cult of " righteous- 
ness." Oppression and tyranny on the part of the 
rich had long become a standing and inexhaustible 
theme with the Psalmists and with all men of any 
warm feelings. Jesus, too, could not have spoken 
of the rich as he did speak, unless they had grossly 
neglected their duties. 

In the poor and oppressed classes, in the huge 
mass of want and evil, amongst the multitude of 
people for whom the word " misery " is often only 
another expression for the word "life," nay, is life 
itself— in this multitude there were groups of people 
at that time, as we can surely see, who, with fervent 
and steadfast hope, were hanging upon the promises 
and consoling words of their God, waiting in hu- 



The Social Question 99 

mility and patience for the day when their deliver- 
ance was to come. Often too poor to pay even for 
the barest advantages and privileges of public wor- 
ship, oppressed, thrust aside, and unjustly treated, 
they could not raise their eyes to the temple ; but 
they looked to the God of Israel, and fervent 
prayers went up to Him : " Watchman, what of the 
night ?" Thus their hearts were opened to God 
and ready to receive Him, and in many of the 
Psalms, and in the later Jewish literature which was 
akin to them, the word "poor" directly denotes 
those who have their hearts open and are waiting 
for the consolation of Israel. Jesus found this 
usage of speech in existence and adopted it. There- 
fore when we come across the expression " the 
poor " in the Gospels we must not think, without 
further ceremony, of the poor in the economic sense. 
As a matter of fact, poverty in the economic sense 
coincided to a large extent in those days with re- 
ligious humility and an openness of the heart to- 
wards God, in contrast with the elevated "practice 
of virtue" of the Pharisees and its routine observ- 
ance in "righteousness." But if this were the pre- 
vailing condition of affairs, then it is clear that our 
modern categories of " poor " and " rich " cannot 
be unreservedly transferred to that age. Yet we 
must not forget that in those days the economical 
sense was also, as a rule, included in the word 



ioo What is Christianity? 

"poor." We shall, therefore, have to examine in 
our next lecture the direction in which a distinction 
can be made, or perhaps to ask, whether it is possi- 
ble to fix the inner sense of Jesus' words in spite of 
the peculiar difficulty attaching to the conception 
of "poverty." We can have some confidence, how- 
ever, that we shall not have to remain in obscurity 
on this point; for in its fundamental features the 
Gospel also throws a bright light upon the field cov- 
ered by this question. 



LECTURE VI 

AT the close of the last lecture I referred to the 
problem presented by "the poor" in the 
Gospel. As a rule, the poor of whom Jesus was 
thinking were also those whose hearts are open to- 
wards God, and hence what is said of them cannot 
be applied without further ceremony to the poor 
generally. In considering the social question we 
must, therefore, put aside all those sayings of Jesus 
which obviously refer to the poor in the spiritual 
sense. These include, for instance, the first Beati- 
tude, whether we accept it in the form in which it 
appears in Luke or in Matthew. The Beatitudes 
associated with it make it clear that Jesus was 
thinking of the poor whose hearts were inwardly 
open towards God. But, as we have no time to go 
through all the sayings separately, we must content 
ourselves with some leading considerations in order 
to establish the most important points. 

Jesus regarded the possession of worldly goods as 
a grave danger for the soul, as hardening the heart, 
entangling us in earthly cares, and seducing us into 

IOt 



102 What is Christianity ? 

a vulgar life of pleasure. "A rich man shall hardly 
enter the kingdom of heaven." 

The contention that Jesus desired, so to speak, to 
bring about a general condition of poverty and dis- 
tress, in order that he might afterwards make it the 
basis of his kingdom of heaven — a contention which 
we encounter in different forms — is erroneous. The 
very opposite is the case. Want he called want, 
and evil he called evil. Far from showing them any 
favour, he made the greatest and strongest efforts 
to combat and destroy them. In this sense, too, 
his whole activity was a saving activity, that is to 
say, a struggle against evil and against want. Nay, 
we might almost think that he over-estimated the 
depressing load of poverty and affliction ; that he 
occupied himself too much with it ; and that, taking 
the moral bearings of life as a whole, he attributed 
too great an importance to those forces of sympathy 
and mercy which are expected to counteract this 
state of things. But neither, of course, would this 
view be correct. He knows of a power which he 
thinks still worse than want and misery, namely, 
sin ; and he knows of a force still more emancipat- 
ing than mercy, namely, forgiveness. His discourses 
and actions leave no doubt upon this point. It is 
certain, therefore, that Jesus never and nowhere 
wished to keep up poverty and misery, but, on the 
contrary, he combated them himself and bid others 



The Social Question 103 

combat them. The Christians who in the course of 
the Church's history were for countenancing mendi- 
cancy and recommending universal pauperisation, or 
sentimentally coquetted with misery and distress, 
cannot with any show of reason appeal to him. 
Upon those, however, who were anxious to devote 
their whole lives to the preaching of the Gospel and 
the ministry of the Word — he did not ask this of 
everyone, but regarded it as a special calling from 
God and a special gift — upon them he enjoined the 
renunciation of all that they had, that is to say, all 
worldly goods. Yet that does not mean that he 
relegated them to a life of beggary. On the con- 
trary, they were to be certain that they would find 
their bread and their means of livelihood. What he 
meant by that we learn from a saying of his which 
was accidentally omitted from the Gospels, but has 
been handed down to us by the apostle Paul. In 
the ninth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinth- 
ians he writes: "The Lord hath ordained that 
they which preach the gospel should live of the 
gospel." An absence of worldly possessions he re- 
quired of the ministers of the Word, that is, of the 
missionaries, in order that they might live entirely 
for their calling. But he did not mean that they 
were to beg. This is a Franciscan misconception 
which is perhaps suggested by Jesus' words but 
carries us away from his meaning. 



104 What is Christianity ? 

In this connexion allow me to digress for a mo- 
ment from our subject. Those members of the 
Christian churches who have become professional 
evangelists or ministers of the Word in their par- 
ishes have not, as a rule, found it necessary to fol- 
low the Lord's injunction to dispossess themselves 
of their worldly goods. So far as priests or pas- 
tors, as the case may be, and not missionaries, are 
concerned, it may be said with some justice that the 
injunction does not refer to them; for it presup- 
poses that a man has undertaken the office of propa- 
gating the Gospel. It may be said, further, that the 
Lord's injunctions, over and above those relating to 
the commandment of love, must not be made into 
inviolable laws, as otherwise Christian liberty will be 
impaired, and the high privilege of the Christian re- 
ligion to adapt its shape to the course of history, 
free from all constraint, will be prejudiced. But 
still it may be asked whether it would not have 
been an extraordinary gain to Christianity if those 
who are called to be its ministers, — the missionaries 
and pastors, had followed the Lord's rules. At the 
very least, it ought to be a strict principle with them 
to concern themselves with property and worldly 
goods only so far as will prevent them being a bur- 
den to others, and beyond that to renounce them. 
I entertain no doubt that the time will come when 
the world will tolerate a life of luxury among those 



The Social Question 105 

who are charged with the cure of souls as little as it 
tolerates priestly government. Our feelings in this 
respect are becoming finer, and that is an advan- 
tage. It will no longer be thought fitting, in the 
higher sense of the word, for anyone to preach re- 
signation and contentment to the poor, who is well 
off himself, and zealously concerned for the increase 
of his property. A healthy man may well offer con- 
solation to the sick; but how shall a man of pro- 
perty convince those who have none that worldly 
goods are of no value ? The Lord's injunction that 
the minister of the Word is to divest himself of 
worldly possessions will still come to be honoured 
in the history of his communion. 

Jesus laid down no social programme for the sup- 
pression of poverty and distress, if by programme 
we mean a set of definitely prescribed regulations. 
With economical conditions and contemporary cir- 
cumstances he did not interfere. Had he become 
entangled in them ; had he given laws which were 
ever so salutary for Palestine, what would have been 
gained by it? They would have served the needs 
of a day, and to-morrow would have been antiqua- 
ted ; to the Gospel they would have been a burden 
and a source of confusion. We must be careful not 
to exceed the limits set to such injunctions as 
"Give to him that asketh thee" and others of a 
similar kind. They must be understood in connexion 



106 What is Christianity? 

with the time and the situation. They refer 
to the immediate wants of the applicant, which 
were satisfied with a piece of bread, a drink of 
water, an article of clothing to cover his nakedness. 
We must remember that in the Gospel we are in the 
East, and in circumstances which from an economi- 
cal point of view are somewhat undeveloped. Jesus 
was no social reformer. He could say on occasion, 
"The poor ye have always with you," and thereby, 
it seems, indicate that the conditions would undergo 
no essential change. He refused to be a judge be- 
tween contending heirs, and a thousand problems of 
economics and social life he would have just as re- 
solutely put aside as the unreasonable demand that 
he would settle a question of inheritance. Yet 
again and again people have ventured to deduce 
some concrete social programme from the Gospel. 
Even evangelical theologians have made the at- 
tempt, and are still making it — an endeavour hope- 
less in itself and full of danger, but absolutely 
bewildering and intolerable when the people try to 
"fill up the gaps" — and they are many — to be 
found in the Gospel with regulations and pro- 
grammes drawn from the Old Testament. 

No religion, not even Buddhism, ever went to 
work with such an energetic social message, and so 
strongly identified itself with that message as we 
see to be the case in the Gospel. How so ? Be- 



The Social Question 107 

cause the words "Love thy neighbour as thyself" 
were spoken in deep earnest; because with these 
words Jesus turned a light upon all the concrete 
relations of life, upon the world of hunger, poverty 
and misery; because, lastly, he uttered them as a 
religious, nay, as the religious maxim. Let me re- 
mind you once more of the parable of the Last 
Judgment, where the whole question of a man's 
worth and destiny is made dependent on whether 
he has practised the love of his neighbour; let me 
remind you of the other parable of the rich man 
and poor Lazarus. I should like to cite another 
story, too, which is little known, because it occurs 
in this wording not in our four Gospels but in the 
Gospel of the Hebrews. The story of the rich 
young man is there handed down as follows : — 

A rich man said to the Lord : Master, what good 
must I do that I may have life ? He answered him : 
Man, keep the law and the prophets. The other 
answered : That have I done. He said to him: Go, sell 
all thy possessions and distribute them to the poor, and 
come and follow me. Then the rich man began to 
scratch his head, and the speech did not please him. 
And the Lord said to him : How canst thou say: I have 
kept the law and the prophets, as it is written in the 
law, Love thy neighbour as thyself ? Behold, many of 
thy brethren, sons of Abraham, lie in dirty rags and die 
of hunger, and thy house is full of many goods, and 
nothing comes out of it to them. 



108 What is Christianity ? 

You observe how Jesus felt the material wants of 
the poor, and how he deduced a remedy for such 
distress from the commandment: "Love thy neigh- 
bour as thyself." People ought not to speak of lov- 
ing their neighbours if they can allow men beside 
them to starve and die in misery. It is not only 
that the Gospel preaches solidarity and the helping 
of others; it is in this message that its real import 
consists. In this sense it is profoundly socialistic, 
just as it is also profoundly individualistic, because 
it establishes the infinite and independent value of 
every human soul. Its tendency to union and 
brotherliness is not so much an accidental phenom- 
enon in its history as the essential feature of its 
character. The Gospel aims at founding a com- 
munity among men as wide as human life itself and 
as deep as human need. As has been truly said, its 
object is to transform the socialism which rests on 
the basis of conflicting interests into the socialism 
which rests on the consciousness of a spiritual unity. 
In this sense its social message can never be outbid. 
In the course of the ages people's opinions as to 
what constitutes "an existence worthy of a man" 
have, thank God, become much changed and im- 
proved. But Jesus, too, knew of this way of 
measuring things. Did he not once refer, almost 
bitterly, to his own position: "The foxes have 
holes, and the birds of the air have nests : but the 



The Social Question 109 

Son of Man hath not where to lay his head " ? A 
dwelling, sufficient daily bread, cleanliness — all 
these needs he touched upon, and their satisfaction 
he held to be necessary, and a condition of earthly 
life. If a man cannot procure them for himself, 
others are to step in and do it for him. There can 
be no doubt, therefore, that if Jesus were with us 
to-day he would side with those who are making 
great efforts to relieve the hard lot of the poor and 
procure them better conditions of life. The falla- 
cious principle of the free play of forces, of the 
"live and let live" principle — a better name for it 
would be the "live and let die" — is entirely op- 
posed to the Gospel. And it is not as our servants, 
but as our brothers, that we are to help the poor. 

Lastly, our riches do not belong to us alone. The 
Gospel has prescribed no regulations as to how we 
are to use them, but it leaves us in no doubt that 
we are to regard ourselves not as owners but as ad- 
ministrators in the service of our neighbour. Nay, 
it almost looks as if Jesus contemplated the possi- 
bility of a union among men in which wealth, as 
private property in the strict sense of the word, was 
non-existent. Here, however; we touch upon a 
question which is not easy to decide, and which, 
perhaps, ought not to be raised at all, because 
Jesus' eschatological ideas and his particular hori- 
zon enter into it. Nor is it a question that we need 



1 10 What is Christianity ? 

raise. It is the disposition which Jesus kindled in 
his disciples towards poverty and want that is all- 
important. 

The Gospel is a social message, solemn and over- 
powering in its force ; it is the proclamation of sol- 
idarity and brotherliness, in favour of the poor. 
But the message is bound up with the recognition 
of the infinite value of the human soul, and is con- 
tained in what Jesus said about the kingdom of 
God. We may also assert that it is an essential 
part of what he there said. But laws or ordi- 
nances or injunctions bidding us forcibly alter the 
conditions of the age in which we may happen to be 
living are not to be found in the Gospel. 

(3) The Gospel and the law, or the question of 
public order. 

The problem dealing with the relation of the Gos- 
pel to law embraces two leading questions: (1) the 
relation of the Gospel to constituted authority; (2) 
the relation of the Gospel to legal ordinances gener- 
ally, in so far as they possess a wider range than is 
covered by the conception "constituted authority." 
It is not easy to mistake the answer to the first 
question, but the second is more complicated and 
beset with greater difficulties ; and very diverse 
opinions are entertained in regard to it. 

As to Jesus' relation to the constituted authori- 



The Gospel and Law in 

ties of his day, I need scarcely remind you again in 
express terms that he was no political revolutionary, 
and that he laid down no political programme. Al- 
though he is sure that his Father would send him 
twelve legions of angels were he to ask Him, he did 
not ask Him. When they wanted to make him a 
king, he disappeared. Ultimately, indeed, when he 
thought well to reveal himself to the whole nation 
as the Messiah — how he came to the decision and 
carried it out are points in which we are left in the 
dark — he made his entry into Jerusalem as a king; 
but of the modes of presenting himself which 
prophecy suggested, he chose that which was most 
remote from a political manifestation. The way in 
which he understood his Messianic duty is shown 
by his driving the buyers and sellers from the tem- 
ple. In this cleansing of the temple it was not the 
constituted authorities whom he attacked, but those 
who had assumed to themselves rights of authority 
over the soul. In every nation, side by side with 
the constituted authorities, an unconstituted au- 
thority is established, or rather two unconstituted 
authorities. They are the political church and the 
political parties. What the political church wants, 
in the widest sense of the word and under very vari- 
ous guises, is to rule; to get hold of men's souls 
and bodies, consciences and worldly goods. What 
political parties want is the same; and when the 



ii2 What is Christianity ? 

heads of these parties set themselves up as popular 
leaders, a terrorism is developed which is often 
worse than the fear of royal despots. It was not 
otherwise in Palestine in Jesus' day. The priests 
and the Pharisees held the nation in bondage and 
murdered its soul. For this unconstituted " au- 
thority " Jesus showed a really emancipating and 
refreshing disrespect. He was never tired of at- 
tacking it — nay, in his struggle with it he roused 
himself to a state of holy indignation — of exposing 
its wolfish nature and hypocrisy, and of declaring 
that its day of judgment was at hand. In whatever 
domain it had any warrant to act, he accepted it : 
" Go and show yourselves unto the priests." So 
far as they really proclaimed God's law he recog- 
nised them: " Whatever they tell you to do, that 
do." But these were the people to whom he read 
the terrible lecture given in Matthew xxiii. : " Woe 
unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye 
are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed ap- 
pear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead 
men's bones and of all uncleanness." Towards 
these spiritual " authorities," then, he filled his dis- 
ciples with a holy want of respect, and even of 
" King" Herod he spoke with bitter irony: " Go 
ye and tell that fox." On the other hand, so far as 
we can judge from the scanty evidence before us, 
his attitude towards the real authorities, those who 



The Gospel and Law 113 

wielded the sword, was different. He recognised 
that they had an actual right to be obeyed, and he 
never withdrew his own person from their jurisdic- 
tion. Nor are we to understand the commandment 
against swearing as including an oath taken before 
a magistrate. No one with a grain of salt, as WelL 
hausen has rightly said, can miss the inner meaning 
of this commandment. On the other hand, we 
must be careful not to rate Jesus' position in regard 
to constituted authority too high. People usually 
appeal to the often quoted saying: " Render unto 
Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God 
the things that are God's." But this saying is often 
misunderstood. Wherever it is explained as mean- 
ing that Jesus recognised God and Caesar as the two 
powers which in some way or other exist side by 
side, or are even in secret alliance, it is taken in a 
wrong sense. Jesus had no such thought; on the 
contrary, he spoke of the two powers as separate and 
divorced from each other. God and Caesar are the 
lords of two quite different provinces. Jesus settled 
the question that was in dispute by pointing out 
this difference, which is so great that no conflict be- 
tween the powers can arise. The penny is an 
earthly coin and bears Caesar's image; let it be 
given, then, to Caesar, but — this we may take as the 
complement — the soul and all its powers have no- 
thing to do with Caesar; they belong to God. In 



ii4 What is Christianity? 

a word, the all-important matter, in Jesus' view, is 
not to mix up the two provinces. When we are 
once quite clear about this, then we may go on to 
remark on the significance of the fact that Jesus en- 
joined compliance with the demand for payment of 
the imperial taxes. No doubt it is important to 
note that he himself respected the constituted au- 
thorities, and wished to see them respected; but 
in regard to the estimate which he formed of 
them, what he said is, at the least, of a neutral 
character. 

On the other hand, we possess another saying of 
Jesus in regard to constituted authority which is 
much less often quoted, and nevertheless affords us 
a deeper insight into the Lord's thoughts than the 
one which we have just discussed. Let us consider 
it for a moment. The fact that it forms a point of 
transition to the consideration of the attitude which 
Jesus took up in regard to legal regulations in gen- 
eral also makes it worth our attention. In Mark x. 
42, we read : 

Jesus called them (/. <?., his disciples) to him and 
saith unto them, Ye know that they which are accounted 
to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them : 
and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But 
so shall it not be among you : but whosoever shall be 
great among you shall be your minister : and whosoever 
of you will be the chiefest shall be servant of all. 



The Gospel and Law 115 

Observe here, first of all, the " transvaluation of 
values." Jesus simply reverses the usual process : 
to be great and to occupy the foremost position 
means, in his view, to serve ; his disciples are to aim, 
not at ruling, but at each being all other men's serv- 
ant. Next observe the opinion which he has of 
authority as it was then constituted. Their func- 
tions are based on force, and this is the very reason 
which, in Jesus' view, puts them outside the moral 
sphere; nay, there is a fundamental opposition be- 
tween it and them: " Thus do the earthly rulers." 
Jesus tells his disciples to act differently. Law and 
legal ordinance, as resting on force only, on actual 
power and its exercise, have no moral value. Nev- 
ertheless Jesus did not command men not to sub- 
ject themselves to these authorities ; they were to 
rate them according to their value, that is, accord- 
ing to their non-value, and they were to arrange 
their own lives on other principles, namely, on the 
opposite ; they were not to use force, but to serve. 
Here we have already passed to the general ground 
of legal ordinance, for it seems to be an essential 
feature of all law to secure observance by force 
when called in question. 

When we approach the second point, the relation 
of the Gospel to legal ordinance generally, we again 
encounter two different views. One of them — in 
modern times more particularly maintained, in his 



1 1 6 What is Christianity ? 

treatise on Canon Law, by Professor Sohm of Leip- 
zig, who presents points of contact with Tolstoi — 
lays down that in their respective natures law and 
the world of spiritual things are diametrically op- 
posed ; and that it is in contradiction with the char- 
acter of the Gospel and the community founded 
thereon that the Church has developed any legal 
ordinances at all. In his survey of the earliest de- 
velopment of the Church Professor Sohm has gone 
so far as to see in the moment when Christendom 
gave a place in its midst to legal ordinances a sec- 
ond Fall. Nevertheless he is unwilling to impugn 
the law in its own province. But Tolstoi refuses, 
in the name of the Gospel, to allow the law any 
rights at all. He maintains that the leading prin- 
ciple of the Gospel is that a man is never to insist 
upon his rights, and that not even constituted au- 
thority is to offer any external resistance to evil. 
Authority and law are simply to cease. Opposed 
to Tolstoi there are others who more or less posi- 
tively contend that the Gospel takes law and legal 
relations under its protection; that it sanctifies 
them and thereby raises them into a divine sphere. 
These are, briefly, the two leading points of view 
which are here in conflict. 

As regards the latter, there is little that need be 
said. It is a mockery of the Gospel to say that it 
protects and sanctifies everything that presents 



The Gospel and Law 117 

itself as law and legal relation at a given moment. 
Leaving a thing alone and bearing with it are not the 
same as sanctioning and preserving it. Nay, it is a 
serious question whether even bearing with it is not 
too much to say, and whether Tolstoi is not right. 
The difficulty of the matter makes it necessary that 
I should take you back a little way in Jewish 
history. 

For hundreds of years the poor and oppressed in 
the people of Israel had been crying out for justice. 
It was a cry which still affects us to-day as we hear 
it in the words of the prophets and out of the 
prayers of the Psalmists; but time after time it 
passed unheeded, None of the legal regulations in 
force was free from the power of tyrannical authori- 
ties, to be distorted and exploited by them just as 
they saw fit. In speaking of legal regulations and 
their exercise, and in examining Jesus' attitude to- 
wards them, we must not straightway think of our 
own legal relations, which have grown up partly on 
the basis of Christianity. Jesus was of a nation 
the greater part of which had for generations been 
in vain asking for their rights, and which was fa- 
miliar with law only in the form of force. The 
necessary consequence was that in such a nation a 
feeling of despair arose in regard to the law; de- 
spair, as much of the possibility of ever getting just- 
ice on earth as, conversely, of the moral claim of 



1 1 8 What is Christianity ? 

law to have any validity at all. We can see some- 
thing of this temper even in the Gospel. But there 
is a second consideration which is a standing correct- 
£ ive to this temper. Jesus, like all truly religious 
minds, was firmly convinced that in the end God 
will do justice. If He does not do it here, He will 
do it in the Beyond, and that is the main point. In 
lis connexion there was, in Jesus' view, nothing 
objectionable in the idea of law in the sense of a 
just recompense ; it was a lofty, nay, a dominating 
idea. Just recompense is the function of God's 
majesty ; to what extent it is modified by His mercy 
is a question which we need not here consider. The 
contention that Jesus took a depreciatory view of lav/ 
as such, and of the exercise of law, cannot be sus- 
tained for a moment. On the contrary, everyone is 
to get his rights; nay more, his disciples are one 
day to share in administering God's justice and 
themselves judge. It was only the justice which 
was exercised with violence and therefore unjustly, 
the justice which lay upon the nation like a tyran- 
nical and bloody decree, that he set aside. He be- 
lieved in true justice, and he was certain, too, that 
it would prevail ; so certain, that he did not think 
it necessary for justice to use force in order to re- 
main justice. 

This brings us to the last point. We possess a 
number of Jesus' sayings in which he directs his 



The Gospel and Law 119 

disciples to renounce all their lawful demands, and 
so forego their just rights. You all know those 
sayings. Let me remind you of one only: " But I 
say unto you, That ye resist not evil, but whosoever 
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the 
other also. And if any man will sue thee at the 
law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak 
also." The demand here made seems to proscribe 
law and disorganise all the legal relations of life. 
Again and again these words have been appealed to 
with the object of showing either that Christianity 
is incompatible with life as it actually is, or that 
Christendom has fallen away from the principles of 
its Master. By way of reply to this argument the 
following observations may be made: — (i.) Jesus 
was, as we have seen, steeped in the conviction 
that God does justice ; in the end, therefore, the op- 
pressor will not prevail, but the oppressed will get 
his rights, (ii.) Earthly rights are in themselves 
of little account, and it does not much matter if we 
lose them, (iii.) The world is in such an unhappy 
state, injustice has got so much the upper hand in 
it, that the victim of oppression is incapable of mak- 
ing good his rights even if he tries, (iv.) As God 
— and this is the main point — mingles His justice 
with mercy, and lets His sun shine on the just and 
on the unjust, so Jesus' disciple is to show love to 
his enemies and disarm them by gentleness. Such 



1 20 What is Christianity ? 

are the thoughts which underlie those lofty sayings 
and at the same time set them their due limits. 
And is the demand which they contain really so 
supramundane, so impossible ? Do we not in the 
circle of our family and friends advise those who 
belong to us to act in the same way, and not to re- 
turn evil for evil and abuse for abuse ? What 
family, what society, could continue to exist, if 
every member of it were anxious only to pursue his 
own rights, and did not learn to renounce them 
even when attacked? Jesus regards his disciples as 
a circle of friends, and he looks out beyond this 
circle to a league of brothers which will take shape 
in the future and extend. But, we are asked, are 
we in all cases to renounce the pursuit of our rights 
in the face of our enemies ? are we to use no weap- 
ons but those of gentleness ? To speak with Tol- 
stoi, are the magistrates not to inflict punishment, 
and thereby to be effaced ? are nations not to fight 
for house and home when they are wantonly at- 
tacked ? I venture to maintain that, when Jesus 
spoke the words which I have quoted, he was not 
thinking of such cases, and that to interpret them 
in this direction involves a clumsy and dangerous 
misconception of their meaning. Jesus never had 
anyone but the individual in mind, and the abiding 
disposition of the heart in love. To say that this 
disposition cannot coexist with the pursuit of one's 



The Gospel and Law 121 

own rights, with the conscientious administration 
of justice, and with the stern punishment of crime, 
is a piece of prejudice, in support of which we may 
appeal in vain to the letter of those sayings, which 
did not aim at being laws or, therefore, at prescrib- 
ing regulations. This much, however, must be 
added, in order that the loftiness of the demand 
which the Gospel makes may be in no way abated : 
Jesus' disciple ought to be able to renounce the 
pursuit of his rights, and ought to co-operate in 
forming a nation of brothers, in which justice is 
done, no longer by the aid of force, but by free 
obedience to the good, and which is united not by 
legal regulations but by the ministry of love. 



LECTURE VII 

WE were occupied in the last lecture with the 
relation of the Gospel to law and legal ordi- 
nance. We saw that Jesus was convinced that God 
does, and will do, justice. We saw, further, that 
he demanded of his disciples that they should be 
able to renounce their rights. In giving expression 
to this demand, far from having all the circum- 
stances of his own time in mind, still less the more 
complex conditions of a later age, he has one and 
one only present to his soul, namely, the relation of 
every man to the kingdom of God. Because a man 
is to sell all that he has in order to buy the pearl of 
great price, so he must also be able to abandon his 
earthly rights and subordinate everything to that 
highest relation. But in connexion with this mes- 
sage of his, Jesus opens up to us the prospect of a 
union among men, which is held together not by 
any legal ordinance, but by the rule of love, and 
where a man conquers his enemy by gentleness. It 
is a high and glorious ideal, and we have received 
it from the very foundation of our religion. It 
ought to float before our eyes as the goal and guid- 

122 



The Gospel and Law 123 

ing star of our historical development. Whether 
mankind will ever attain to it, who can say ? but 
we can and ought to approximate to it, and in 
these days — otherwise than two or three hundred 
years ago — we feel a moral obligation in this di- 
rection. Those of us who possess more delicate 
and therefore more prophetic perceptions no longer 
regard the kingdom of love and peace as a mere 
Utopia. 

But for this very reason there are many among us 
to-day upon whom a very serious and difficult quest- 
ion presses with redoubled force. We see a whole 
class struggling for its rights ; or, rather, we see it 
struggling to extend and increase its rights. Is that 
compatible with the Christian temper ? Does not 
the Gospel forbid such a struggle ? Have we not 
been told that we are to renounce the rights we 
have, to say nothing of trying to get more ? Must 
we, then, as Christians, recall the labouring classes 
from the struggle for their rights, and exhort them 
only to patience and submission ? 

The problem with which we have here to do is 
also stated more or less in the form of an accusation 
against Christianity. Earnest men in political cir- 
cles of a socialistic tendency, who would gladly be 
guided by Jesus Christ, complain that in this matter 
the Gospel leaves them in the lurch. They say that 
it imposes restraint upon aspirations which with a 



1 24 What is Christianity ? 

clear conscience they feel to be justified; that in re- 
quiring absolute meekness and submission it disarms 
everyone who wants to fight ; that it narcotises, as 
it were, all real energy. Some say this with pain 
and regret, others with satisfaction. The latter as- 
sert that they always knew that the Gospel was not 
for the healthy and the strong, but for the broken- 
down ; that it knows, and wants to know, nothing 
of the fact that life, and especially modern life, is a 
struggle, a struggle for one's own rights. What 
answer are we to give them ? 

My own opinion is that these statements and 
complaints are made by people who have never yet 
clearly realised with what it is that the Gospel has 
to do, and who rashly and improperly connect it 
with earthly things. The Gospel makes its appeal to 
the inner man, who, whether he is well or wounded, 
in a happy position or a miserable, obliged to 
spend his earthly life fighting or quietly maintaining 
what he has won, always remains the same. " My 
kingdom is not of this world " ; it is no earthly 
kingdom that the Gospel establishes. These words 
not only exclude such a political theocracy as the 
Pope aims at setting up, and all worldly dominion ; 
they have a much wider range. Negatively they 
forbid all direct and formal interference of religion 
in worldly affairs. Positively what the Gospel says 
is this: Whoever you may be, and whatever your 



The Gospel and Law 125 

position, whether bondman or free, whether righting 
or at rest — your real task in life is always the same. 
There is only one relation and one idea which you 
must not violate, and in the face of which all others 
are only transient wrappings and vain show : to be 
a child of God and a citizen of His kingdom, and to 
exercise love. How you are to maintain yourself in 
this life on earth, and in what way you are to serve 
your neighbour, is left to you and your own liberty 
of action. This is what the apostle Paul understood 
by the Gospel, and I do not believe that he misun- 
derstood it. Then let us fight, let us struggle, let 
us get justice for the oppressed, let us order the 
circumstances of the world as we with a clear con- 
science can, and as we may think best for our neigh- 
bour; but do not let us expect the Gospel to afford 
us any direct help ; let us make no selfish demands 
for ourselves; and let us not forget that the world 
passes away, not only with the lusts thereof, but 
also with its regulations and its goods ! Once more 
be it said : the Gospel knows only one goal, one 
idea ; and it demands of a man that he shall never put 
them aside. If the exhortation to renounce takes, 
in a harsh and one-sided way, a foremost place 
in Jesus' words, we must be careful to keep before 
our eyes the paramount and exclusive claims of the 
relation to God and the idea of love. The Gospel 
is above all questions of mundane development; 



126 What is Christianity? 

it is concerned, not with material things but with 
the souls of men. 

With this we have already passed to the next 
question which was to occupy our attention, and 
we have half answered it. 

(4) The Gospel and work, or the question of 
civilisation. 

The points which we shall have to consider here 
are essentially the same as those which we empha- 
sised in regard to the question just discussed; and 
we shall therefore be able to proceed more concisely. 

Jesus' teaching has been felt again and again, but 
above all in our own day, to exhibit no interest in 
any systematic work or calling, and no appreciation 
of those ideal possessions which go by the name of 
Art and Science. Nowhere, people say, does Jesus 
summon men to labour and to put their hands to 
the work of progress; in vain shall we look in his 
words for any expression of pleasure in vigorous ac- 
tivity; these ideal possessions lay far beyond his 
field of vision. In that last, unhappy book of his, 
The Old Faith and the New, Da vid Friedrich 
Strauss^gave particularly harsh expression to this 
feeling. He speaks of a fundamental defect in the 
Gospel, which he considers antiquated and useless 
because out of sympathy with the progress of civil- 
isation. But long before Strauss the Pietistic 



Civilisation 127 

movement exhibited the same sort of feeling. The 
Pietists tried to evade the difficulty in a way of their 
own. They started from the position that Jesus 
must be able to serve as a direct example for all 
men, whatever their calling; that he must have 
proved himself in all the situations in which a man 
can be placed. They admitted that a cursory ex- 
amination of Jesus' life disclosed the fact that this 
requirement was not fulfilled ; but they were of 
opinion that on a closer inspection it would be 
found that he was really the best bricklayer, the best 
tailor, the best judge, the best scholar, and so on, 
and that he had the best knowledge and under- 
standing for everything. They turned and twisted 
what Jesus said and did until it was made to express 
and corroborate what they wanted. Although it 
was a childish attempt which they made, the prob- 
lem of which they were sensible was nevertheless of 
some moment. They felt that their consciences and 
their callings bound them to a definite activity and 
a definite business ; they were clear that they ought 
not to become monks; and yet they were anxious 
to practise the imitation of Christ in the full sense. 
They felt, then, that he must have stood in the 
same situation as they themselves, and that his hori- 
zon must have been the same as theirs. 

Here we have the same case as we dealt with in 
the last section, only covering a wider field. It is 



128 What is Christianity? 

the ancient and constantly recurring error, that the 
Gospel has to do with the affairs of the world, and 
that it is its business to prescribe how they are to be 
carried on. Here, too, the old and almost ineradi- 
cable tendency of mankind to rid itself of its free- 
dom and responsibility in higher things and subject 
itself to a law, comes into play. It is much easier, 
in fact, to resign oneself to any, even the sternest, 
kind of authority, than to live in the liberty of the 
good. But, apart from this, the question remains : 
Is it not a real defect in the Gospel that it betrays 
so little sympathy with the business of life, and is 
out of touch with the humaniora in the sense of sci- 
ence, art, and civilisation generally ? 

I answer, in the first place: What would have 
been gained if it had not possessed this " defect " ? 
Suppose that it had taken an active interest in all 
those efforts, would it not have become entangled 
in them, or, at any rate, have incurred the risk of 
appearing to be so entangled? Labour, art, science, 
the progress of civilisation — these are not things 
which exist in the abstract ; they exist in the par- 
ticular phase of an age. The Gospel, then, would 
have had to ally itself with them. But phases 
change. In the Roman Church of to-day we see 
how heavily religion is burdened by being con- 
nected with a particular epoch of civilisation. In the 
Middle Ages this Church, anxious to participate to 



Civilisation 1 29 

the full in all questions of progress and civilisation, 
gave them form and shape, and laid down their 
laws. Insensibly, however, the Church identified 
its sacred inheritance and its peculiar mission with 
the knowledge, the maxims, and the interests which 
it then acquired ; so that it is now, as it were, firmly 
pinned down to the philosophy, the political econ- 
omy, in short, to the whole civilisation, of the Mid- 
dle Ages. On the other hand, what a service the 
Gospel has rendered to mankind by having sounded 
the notes of religion in mighty chords and banished 
every other melody ! 

In the second place, labour and the progress of 
civilisation are, no doubt, very precious, and sum- 
mon us to strenuous exertion. But they do not 
comprise the highest ideal. They are incapable of 
filling the soul with real satisfaction. Although 
work may give pleasure, that is only one aspect of 
the matter. I have always found that the people 
who talk loudest about the pleasure which work 
affords make no very great efforts themselves; 
whilst those who are uninterruptedly engaged in 
heavy labour are hesitating in its praises. As a 
matter of fact, there is a great deal of hypocritical 
twaddle talked about work. Three-fourths of it 
and more is nothing but stupefying toil, and the 
man who really works hard shares the poet's aspira- 
tions as he looks forward to evening : 
9 



130 What is Christianity? 

Head, hands and feet rejoice : the work is done. 

And then, think of the results of all this labour ! 
When a man has done a piece of work, he would 
like to do it over again, and the knowledge of its 
defects falls heavily on soul and conscience. No ! 
it is not in so far as we work that we live, but in so 
far as we rejoice in the love of others, and ourselves 
exercise love. Faust is right: Labour which is 
labour and nothing else becomes an aversion. We 
long for the streams of living water, and for the 
spring itself from which those waters flow : 

Man sehnt sick nach des Lebens Bdchen, 
Ach ! nach des Lebens Quelle hin. 

Labour is a valuable safety-valve and useful in 
keeping off greater ills, but it is not in itself an ab- 
solute good, and we cannot include it amongst our 
ideals. The same may be said of the progress of 
civilisation. It is, of course, to be welcomed ; but 
the piece of progress in which we delight to-day 
becomes something mechanical by to-morrow, and 
leaves us cold. The man of any deep feeling will 
thankfully receive anything that the development of 
progress may bring him ; but he knows very well that 
his situation inwardly — the problems that agitate him 
and the fundamental position in which he stands-v- 
is not essentially, nay, is scarcely even unessen- 
tially, altered by it all. It is only for a moment that 



Civilisation 131 

it seems as if something new were coming, and a 
man were being really relieved of his burden. Gen- 
tlemen, when a man grows older and sees more 
deeply into life, he does not find, if he possesses 
any inner world at all, that he is advanced by the 
external march of things, by ' ' the progress of civil- 
isation." Nay, he feels himself, rather, where he 
was before, and forced to seek the sources of 
strength which his forefathers also sought. He is 
forced to make himself a native of the kingdom of 
God, the kingdom of the Eternal, the kingdom of 
Love ; and he comes to understand that it was only 
of this kingdom that Jesus Christ desired to speak 
and to testify, and he is grateful to him for it. 

But, in the third place, Jesus had a strong and 
positive conviction of the aggressive and forward 
character of his message. " I am come to send fire 
on the earth, and " — he added — " what will I if it 
be already kindled ? " The fire of the judgment 
and the forces of love were what he wanted to sum- 
mon up, so as to create a new humanity. If he 
spoke of these forces of love in the simple manner 
corresponding to the conditions nearest at hand — 
the feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the naked, 
the visiting of the sick and those in prison — it is 
nevertheless clear that a great inward transforma- 
tion of the humanity which he saw in the mirror of 
the little nation in Palestine hovered before his 



13 2 What is Christianity? 

eyes: " One is your master, and all ye are breth- 
ren." The last hour is come; but in the last hour 
from a small seed a tree is to grow up which shall 
spread its branches far and wide. Further, he was 
revealing the knowledge of God, and he was certain 
that it would ripen the young, strengthen the weak, 
and make them God's champions. Knowledge of 
God is the spring that is to fructify the barren field, 
and pour forth streams of living water. In this 
sense he spoke of it as the highest and the only 
necessary good, as the condition of all edification, 
and, we may also say, of all true growth and pro- 
gress. Lastly, he saw on his horizon not only the 
judgment, but also a kingdom of justice, of love, 
and of peace, which, though it came from heaven, 
was nevertheless for this earth. When it is to 
come, he himself knows not — the hour is known to 
the Father only; but he knows how and by what 
means it will spread; and side by side with the 
highly coloured, dramatic pictures which pass 
through his soul there are quiet perceptions which 
are fixed and steady. He sees the vineyard of God 
on this earth and God calling His labourers into it 
— happy the man who receives a call ! They labour 
in the vineyard, stand no longer idle in the market- 
place, and at last receive their reward. Or take the 
parable of the talents distributed in order to be em- 
ployed, and therefore not to be buried in a napkin. 



Chris tology 133 

A day's work, labour, increase, progress — he sees it 
all, but placed at the service of God and neighbour, 
encircled by the light of the Eternal, and removed 
from the service of transient things. 

To sum up what we have here tried to indicate : Is 
the complaint from which we started at the beginning 
of this section justified ? Ought we really to desire 
that the Gospel had adapted itself to " the progress 
of civilisation" ? Here, too, I think, we have to 
learn from the Gospel and not to find fault with it. 
It tells us of the real work which humanity has to 
accomplish, and we ought not to meet its message 
by entrenching ourselves behind our miserable 
" work of civilisation." " The image of Christ," 
as a modern historian justly says, " remains the 
sole basis of all moral culture, and in the measure 
in which it succeeds in making its light penetrate 
is the moral culture of the nations increased or 
diminished." 

(5) The Gospel and the Son of God, or the 
Christological question. 

We now pass from the sphere of questions of 
which we have been treating hitherto. The four 
previous questions are all intimately connected with 
one another. Failure to answer them rightly always 
proceeds from not rating the Gospel high enough ; 
from somehow or other dragging it down to the 



134 What is Christianity? 

level of mundane questions and entangling it in 
them. Or, to put the matter differently: The 
forces of the Gospel appeal to the deepest founda- 
tions of human existence and to them only; it is 
there alone that their leverage is applied. If a man 
is unable, then, to go down to the root of humanity, 
and has no feeling for it and no knowledge of it, he 
will fail to understand the Gospel, and will then try 
to profane it or else complain that it is of no use. 

We now, however, approach quite a different 
problem : What position did Jesus himself take up 
towards the Gospel while he was proclaiming it, and 
how did he wish himself to be accepted ? We are 
not yet dealing with the way in which his disciples 
accepted him, or the place which they gave him in 
their hearts, and the opinion which they formed of 
him; we are now speaking only of his own testi- 
mony of himself. But the question is one which 
lands us in the great sphere of controverted ques- 
tions which cover the history of the Church from 
the first century up to our own time. In the course 
of this controversy men put an end to brotherly fel- 
lowship for the sake of a nuance ; and thousands 
were cast out, condemned, loaded with chains and 
done to death. It is a gruesome story. On the 
question of " Christology " men beat their religious 
doctrines into terrible weapons, and spread fear and 
intimidation everywhere. This attitude still con- 



Christology 135 

tinues: Christology is treated as though the Gospel 
had no other problem to offer, and the accompany- 
ing fanaticism is still rampant in our own day. Who 
can wonder at the difficulty of the problem, weighed 
down as it is with such a burden of history and 
made the sport of parties? Yet anyone who will 
look at our Gospels with unprejudiced eyes will not 
find that the question of Jesus' own testimony is in- 
soluble. So much of it, however, as remains ob- 
scure and mysterious to our minds ought to remain 
so ; as Jesus meant it to be, and as, in the very na- 
ture of the problem, it is. It is only in pictures that 
we can give it expression. ' There are phenomena 
which cannot, without the aid of symbols, be 
brought within the range of the understanding." 

Before we examine Jesus' own testimony about 
himself, two leading points must be established. 
In the first place, he desired no other belief in his 
person and no other attachment to it than is con- 
tained in the keeping of his commandments. Even 
in the fourth Gospel, in which Jesus' person often 
seems to be raised above the contents of the Gospel, 
the idea is still clearly formulated : " If ye love me, 
keep my commandments." He must himself have 
found, during his labours, that some people 
honoured, nay, even trusted him, without troubling 
themselves about the contents of his message. It 
was to them that he addressed the reprimand : 



13 6 What is Christianity? 

" Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, 
shall enter into the kingdom of Heaven; but he 
that doeth the will of my Father." To lay down 
any " doctrine" about his person and his dignity 
independently of the Gospel was, then, quite out- 
side his sphere of ideas. In the second place, he 
described the Lord of heaven and earth as his God 
and his Father; as the Greater, and as Him who is 
alone good. He is certain that everything which 
he has and everything which he is to accomplish 
comes from this Father. He prays to Him; he sub- 
jects himself to His will; he struggles hard to find 
out what it is and to fulfil it. Aim, strength, un- 
derstanding, the issue, and the hard must, all come 
from the Father. This is what the Gospels say, and 
it cannot be turned and twisted. This feeling, 
praying, working, struggling, and suffering individ- 
ual is a man who in the face of his God also associ- 
ates himself with other men. 

These two facts mark out, as it were, the bound- 
aries of the ground covered by Jesus' testimony of 
himself. They do not, it is true, give us any posi- 
tive information as to what he said ; but we shall 
understand what he really meant by his testimony 
if we look closely at the two descriptions which he 
gave of himself: the Son of God and the Messiah 
(the Son of David, the Son of Man). 

The description of himself as the Son of God, 



Christology 137 

Messianic though it may have been in its original 
conception, lies very much nearer to our modern 
way of thinking than the other, for Jesus himself 
gave a meaning to this conception which almost 
takes it out of the class of Messianic ideas, or at all 
events does not make its inclusion in that class ne- 
cessary to a proper understanding of it. On the 
other hand, if we do not desire to be put off with a 
lifeless word, the description of himself as the Mes- 
siah is at first blush one that is quite foreign to our 
ideas. Without some explanation we cannot un- 
derstand, nay, unless we are Jews, we cannot un- 
derstand at all, what this post of honour means and 
what rank and character it possesses. It is only 
when we have ascertained its meaning by historical 
research that we can ask whether the word has a 
significance which in any way survives the destruc- 
tion of the husk in which it took shape in Jewish 
political life. 

Let us first of all consider the designation, " Son 
of God." Jesus in one of his discourses made it 
specially clear why and in what sense he gave him- 
self this name. The saying is to be found in 
Matthew, and not, as might perhaps have been ex- 
pected, in John: " No man knoweth the Son but 
the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, 
save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will 
reveal him." It is "knowledge of God" that 



138 What is Christianity? 

makes the sphere of the Divine Sonship. It is in 
this knowledge that he came to know the sacred 
Being who rules heaven and earth as Father, as his 
Father. The consciousness which he possessed of 
being the Son of God is, therefore, nothing but the 
practical consequence of knowing God as the Father 
and as his Father. Rightly understood, the name 
of Son means nothing but the knowledge of God. 
Here, however, two observations are to be made: 
Jesus is convinced that he knows God in a way in 
which no one ever knew Him before, and he knows 
that it is his vocation to communicate this know- 
ledge of God to others by word and by deed — and 
with it the knowledge that men are God's children. 
In this consciousness he knows himself to be the 
Son called and instituted of God, to be the Son of 
God, and hence he can say: My God and my 
Father, and into this invocation he puts something 
which belongs to no one but himself. How he 
came to this consciousness of the unique character 
of his relation to God as a Son ; how he came to the 
consciousness of his power, and to the conscious- 
ness of the obligation and the mission which this 
power carries with it, is his secret, and no psycho- 
logy will ever fathom it. The confidence with which 
John makes him address the Father: 'Thou 
lovedst me before the foundation of the world ' 
is undoubtedly the direct reflection of the cer- 



Christology 139 

tainty with which Jesus himself spoke. Here all 
research must stop. We are not even able to say 
when it was that he first knew himself as the Son, 
and whether he at once completely identified him- 
self with this idea and let his individuality be ab- 
sorbed in it, or whether it formed an inner problem 
which kept him in constant suspense. No one could 
fathom this mystery who had not had a parallel ex- 
perience. A prophet may, if he chooses, try to 
raise the veil, but, for our part, we must be content 
with the fact that this Jesus who preached humility 
and knowledge of self, nevertheless named himself 
and himself alone as the Son of God. He is certain 
that he knows the Father, that he is to bring this 
knowledge to all men, and that thereby he is doing 
the work of God. Among all the works of God 
this is the greatest ; it is the aim and end of all 
creation. The work is given to him to do, and in 
God's strength he will accomplish it. It was out of 
this feeling of power and in the prospect of victory 
that he uttered the words: " The Father hath com- 
mitted all things unto me." Again and again in 
the history of mankind men of God have come for- 
ward in the sure consciousness of possessing a divine 
message, and of being compelled, whether they will 
or not, to deliver it. But the message has always 
happened to be imperfect ; in this spot or that, de- 
fective; bound up with political or particularistic 



140 What is Christianity ? 

elements ; designed to meet the circumstances of the 
moment ; and very often the prophet did not stand 
the test of being himself an example of his message. 
But in this case the message brought was of the 
profoundest and most comprehensive character; it 
went to the very root of mankind and, although set 
in the framework of the Jewish nation, it addressed 
itself to the whole of humanity — the message from 
God the Father. Defective it is not, and its real 
kernel may be readily freed from the inevitable husk 
of contemporary form. Antiquated it is not, and in 
life and strength it still triumphs to-day over all the 
past. He who delivered it has as yet yielded his 
place to no man, and to human life he still to-day 
gives a meaning and an aim — he the Son of God. 

This already brings us to the other designation 
which Jesus gave of himself: the Messiah. Before 
I attempt briefly to explain it, I ought to mention 
that some scholars of note — and among them Well- 
hausen — have expressed a doubt whether Jesus de- 
scribed himself as the Messiah. In that doubt I 
cannot concur; nay, I think that it is only by 

< wrenching what the evangelists tell us off its hinges 
that the opinion can be maintained. The very ex- 
pression " Son of Man " — that Jesus used it is be- 
yond question — seems to me to be intelligible only 
in a Messianic sense. To say nothing of anything 
else, such a story as that of Christ's entry into Jeru- 



The Messiah 141 

salem would have to be simply expunged, if the 
theory is to be maintained that he did not consider 
himself the promised Messiah and also desire to be 
accepted as such. Moreover, the forms in which 
Jesus expressed what he felt about his own con- 
sciousness and his vocation become quite incompre- 
hensible unless they are taken as the outcome of 
the Messianic idea. Finally, the positive argu- 
ments which are advanced in support of the theory 
are either so very weak, or else so highly question- 
able, that we may remain quite sure that Jesus called 
himself the Messiah. 

The idea of a Messiah and the Messianic notions 
generally, as they existed in Jesus' day, had been 
developed on two combined lines, on the line of the 
kings and on that of the prophets. Alien influences 
had also been at work, and the whole idea was 
transfigured by the ancient expectation that God 
Himself in visible form would take up the govern- 
ment of His people. The leading features of the 
Messianic idea were taken from the Israelitish king- 
dom in the ideal splendour in which it was invested 
after the kingdom itself had disappeared. Mem- 
ories of Moses and of the great prophets also played 
a part in it. In the following lecture we shall 
briefly show what shapes the Messianic hopes had 
assumed up to Jesus' time, and in what way he took 
them up and transformed them. 



LECTURE VIII 

ALTHOUGH the Messianic doctrines prevalent 
in the Jewish nation in Jesus' day were not a 
positive " dogma," and had no connexion with the 
legal precepts which were so rigidly cultivated, they 
formed an essential element of the hopes, religious 
and political, which the nation entertained for the 
future. They were of no very definite character, ex- 
cept in certain fundamental features ; beyond these 
the greatest differences prevailed. The old prophets 
had looked forth to a glorious future in which God 
would Himself come down, destroy the enemies of 
Israel, and work justice, peace, and joy. At the 
same time, however, they had also promised that a 
wise and mighty king of the house of David would 
appear and bring this glorious state of things to 
pass. They had ended by indicating the people of 
Israel itself as the Son of God, chosen from amongst 
the nations of the world. These three views exer- 
cised a determining influence in the subsequent 
elaboration of the Messianic ideas. The hope of a 
glorious future for the people of Israel remained the 
frame into which all expectations were fitted, but in 

142 



The Messiah 143 

the two centuries before Christ the following factors 
were added: (i.) The extension of their historical 
horizon strengthened the interest of the Jews in the 
nations of the world, introduced the notion of 
11 mankind " as a whole, and brought it within the 
sphere of the expected end, including, therefore, 
the operations of the Messiah. The day of judg- 
ment is regarded as extending to the whole world, 
and the Messiah not only as judging the world but 
as ruling it as well, (ii.) In early times, although 
the moral purification of the people had been 
thought of in connexion with the glorious future, 
the destruction of Israel's enemies seemed to be the 
main consideration ; but now the feeling of moral 
responsibility and the knowledge of God as the 
Holy One became more active; the view prevails 
that the Messianic age demands a holy people, and 
that the judgment to come must of necessity also 
be a judgment upon a part of Israel itself, (iii.) As 
individualism became a stronger force, so the rela- 
tion of God to the individual was prominently em- 
phasised. The individual Israelite comes to feel 
that he is in the midst of his people, and he begins 
to look upon it as a sum of individuals; the indi- 
vidual belief in Providence appears side by side 
with the political belief, and combines with the 
feeling of personal worth and responsibility ; and in 
connexion with the expectation of the end, we get 



144 What is Christianity? 

the first dawn of the hope of an eternal life and the 
fear of eternal punishment. The products of this 
inner development are an interest in personal salva- 
tion, and a belief in the resurrection ; and the roused 
conscience is no longer able to hope for a glorious 
future for all in view of the open profanity of the 
people and the power of sin; only a remnant will 
be saved. (iv.) The expectations for the future 
become more and more transcendent; they are in- 
creasingly shifted to the realm of the supernatural 
and the supramundane ; something quite new comes 
down from heaven to earth, and the new course on 
which the world enters severs it from the old ; nay, 
this earth, transfigured as it will be, is no longer the 
final goal ; the idea of an absolute bliss arises, whose 
abode can only be heaven itself, (v.) The person- 
ality of the long-expected Messiah is sharply distin- 
guished, as well from the idea of an earthly king as 
from the idea of the people as a whole, and from 
the idea of God. Although he appears as a man 
amongst men, the Messiah retains scarcely any 
Messianic traits. He is represented as with God 
from the first beginnings of time; he comes down 
from heaven, and accomplishes his work by super- 
human means; the moral traits in the picture formed 
of him come into prominence; he is the perfectly 
just man who fulfils all the commandments. Nay, 
the idea that others benefit by his merits forces its 



The Messiah 145 

way in. The notion, however, of a suffering Mes- 
siah, which might seem to be suggested by Isaiah 
liii., is not reached. 

But none of these speculations succeeded in dis- 
placing the older and simpler conceptions, or in 
banishing that original, patriotic, and political in- 
terpretation of them with which the great majority 
of the people were familiar. God Himself assuming 
the sceptre, destroying His enemies, founding the 
Israelitish kingdom of the world, and availing Him- 
self of a kingly champion for the purpose; every 
man sitting under his own fig-tree, in his own vine- 
yard, enjoying the fruits of peace, with his foot 
upon the neck of his enemies — that was, after all, 
still the most popular conception of the coming of 
the Messiah, and it was fixed in the minds even of 
those who were at the same time attracted to higher 
views. But a portion of the people had undoubt- 
edly awakened to the feeling that the kingdom of 
God presupposes a moral condition of a correspond- 
ing character, and that it could come only to a 
righteous people. Some looked to acquiring this 
righteousness by means of a punctilious observance 
of the law, and no zeal that they could show for it 
was enough; others, under the influences of a 
deeper self-knowledge, began to have a dim idea 
that the righteousness which they so ardently de- 
sired could itself come only from the hand of God, 



146 What is Christianity? 

and that in order to shake off the burden of sin — 
for they had begun to be tortured by an inner sense 
of it — divine assistance, and divine grace and mercy, 
were needful. 

Thus in Christ's time there was a surging chaos of 
disparate feeling, as well as of contradictory theory, 
in regard to this one matter. At no other time, per- 
haps, in the history of religion, and in no other peo- 
ple, were the most extreme antitheses so closely 
associated under the binding influence of religion. 
At one moment the horizon seems as narrow as the 
circle of the hills which surround Jerusalem ; at an- 
other it embraces all mankind. Here everything is 
put upon a high plane and regarded from the spirit- 
ual and moral point of view; and there, at but a 
stone's throw, the whole drama seems as though it 
must close with a political victory for the nation. 
In one group all the forces of divine trust and con- 
fidence are disengaged, and the upright man struggles 
through to a solemn " Nevertheless"; in another, 
every religious impulse is stifled by a morally ob- 
tuse, patriotic fanaticism. 

The idea which was formed of the Messiah must 
have been as contradictory as the hopes to which it 
was meant to respond. Not only were people's 
formal notions about him continually changing^— 
questions were being raised, for instance, as to 
the sort of bodily nature which he would have; 



The Messiah 147 

above all, his inmost character and the work to 
which he was to be called appeared in diverse 
lights. But wherever the moral and really re- 
ligious elements had begun to get the upper hand, 
people were forced to abandon the image of the po- 
litical and warlike ruler, and let that of the prophet, 
which had always to some extent helped to form 
the general notions about the Messiah, take its 
place. That he would bring God near; that some- 
how or other he would do justice ; that he would de- 
liver from the burden of torment within — this was 
what was hoped of him. The story of John the 
Baptist as related in our Gospels makes it clear that 
there were devout men in the Jewish nation at that 
time who were expecting a Messiah in this form, or 
at least did not absolutely reject the idea. We learn 
from that story that some were disposed to take 
John for the Messiah. What elasticity the Messi- 
anic ideas must have possessed, and how far, in 
certain circles, they must have travelled from the 
form which they originally assumed, when this very 
unkinglike preacher of repentance, clad in a garment 
of camel's hair, and with no message but that the 
nation had degenerated and its day of judgment 
was at hand, could be taken for the Messiah him- 
self! And when the Gospels go on to tell us that 
not a few among the people took Jesus for the Mes- 
siah only because he taught as one with authority, 



148 What is Christianity? 

and worked miraculous cures, how fundamentally 
the idea of the Messiah seems to be changed ! They 
regarded this saving activity, it is true, only as the 
beginning of his mission; they expected that the 
wonder-worker would presently throw off his dis- 
guise and " set up the kingdom " ; but all that we 
are concerned with here is that they were capable of 
welcoming as the promised one a man whose origin 
and previous life they knew, and who had as yet 
done nothing but preach repentance and proclaim 
that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. We shall 
never fathom the inward development by which 
Jesus passed from the assurance that he was the 
Son of God to the other assurance that he was the 
promised Messiah. But when we see that the idea 
which others as well had formed of the Messiah at 
that time had, by a slow process of change, devel- 
oped entirely new features, and had passed from a 
political and religious idea into a spiritual and re- 
ligious one — when we see this, the problem no longer 
wears a character of complete isolation. That John 
the Baptist and the twelve disciples acknowledged 
Jesus to be the Messiah; that the positive estimate 
which they formed ot his person did not lead them 
to reject the shape in which he appeared, but, on 
the contrary, was fixed in this very shape, is a proof 
of the flexible character of the Messianic idea at the 
time, and also explains how it was that Jesus could 



The Messiah 149 

himself adopt it. " Strength is made perfect in 
weakness." That there is a divine strength and 
glory which stands in no need of earthly power and 
earthly splendour, nay, excludes them ; that there 
is a majesty of holiness and love which saves and 
blesses those upon whom it lays hold, was what he 
knew who in spite of his lowliness called himself the 
Messiah, and the same must have been felt by those 
who recognised him as the king of Israel anointed 
of God. 

How Jesus arrived at the consciousness of being 
the Messiah we cannot explain, but still there are 
some points connected with the question which can 
be established. An inner event which Jesus experi- 
enced at his baptism was, in the view of the oldest 
tradition, the foundation of his Messianic conscious- 
ness. It is not an experience which is subject to 
any criticism ; still less are we in a position to con- 
tradict it. On the contrary, there is a strong proba- 
bility that when he made his public appearance he 
had already settled accounts with himself. The 
evangelists preface their account of his public ac- 
tivity with a curious story of a temptation. This 
story assumes that he was already conscious of be- 
ing the Son of God and the one who was intrusted 
with the all-important work for God's people, and 
that he had overcome the temptations which this 
consciousness brought with it. When John sent to 



150 What is Christianity? 

him from prison to ask, "Art thou he that should 
come, or do we look for another ? " the answer 
which he sent necessarily led his questioner to un- 
derstand that he was the Messiah, but at the same 
time showed him how Jesus conceived the Messi- 
anic office. Then came the day at Caesarea Philippi, 
when Peter acknowledged him as the expected Mes- 
siah, and Jesus joyfully confirmed what he said. 
This was followed by the question to the Pharisees, 
— " What think ye of Christ, whose son is he ? " — 
the scene which ended with the fresh question: " If 
David then call him Lord, how is he his son?" 
Lastly, there was the entry into Jerusalem before 
the whole people, together with the cleansing of the 
temple ; actions which were equivalent to a public 
declaration that he was the Messiah. But his first 
unequivocal Messianic action was also his last. It 
was followed by the crown of thorns and the cross. 
I have said that it is probable that when Jesus 
made his public appearance he had already settled 
accounts with himself, and was therefore clear about 
his mission as well. By this, however, I do not 
mean that, so far as he himself was concerned, he 
had nothing more to learn in the course of it. Not 
only had he to learn to suffer, and to look forward 
to the cross with confidence in God, but the con- 
sciousness of his Sonship was now for the first time 
to be brought to the test. The knowledge of the 



The Messiah 151 

' ' work ' ' which the Father had intrusted to him could 
not be developed except by labour and by victory 
over all opposition. What a moment it must have 
been for him when he recognised that he was the 
one of whom the prophets had spoken ; when he 
saw the whole history of his nation from Abraham 
and Moses downwards in the light of his own mis- 
sion ; when he could no longer avoid the conviction 
that he was the promised Messiah ! No longer 
avoid it ; for how can we refuse to believe that at 
first he must have felt this knowledge to be a terri- 
ble burden ? Yet in saying this we have gone too 
far; and there is nothing more that we can say. 
But in this connexion we can understand that the 
evangelist John was right in making Jesus testify 
over and over again : " I have not spoken of myself ; 
but the Father which sent me; he gave me a com- 
mandment, what I should say, and what I should 
speak." And again: " For I am not alone, but I 
and the Father that sent me." 

But however we may conceive the " Messiah," it 
was an assumption that was simply necessary if the 
man who felt the inward call was to gain an absol- 
ute recognition within the lines of Jewish religious 
history — the profoundest and maturest history that 
any nation ever possessed, nay, as the future was to 
show, the true religious history for all mankind. 



J5 2 What is Christianity? 

The idea of the Messiah became the means — in the 
first instance for the devout of his own nation — of 
effectively setting the man who knew that he was 
the Son of God, and was doing the work of God, on 
the throne of history. But when it had accom- 
plished this, its mission was exhausted. Jesus was 
the " Messiah," and was not the Messiah; and he 
was not the Messiah, because he left the idea far 
behind him ; because he put a meaning into it which 
was too much for it to bear. Although the idea 
may strike us as strange we can still feel some of its 
meaning ; an idea which captivated a whole nation 
for centuries, and in which it deposited all its ideals, 
cannot be quite unintelligible. In the prospect of 
a Messianic period we see once more the old hope 
of a golden age ; the hope which, when moralised, 
must necessarily be the goal of every vigorous 
movement in human life and forms an inalienable 
element in the religious view of history; in the ex- 
pectation of a personal Messiah we see an expres- 
sion of the fact that it is persons who form the saving 
element in history, and that if a union of mankind 
is ever to come about by their deepest forces and 
highest aims being brought into accord, this same 
mankind must agree to acknowledge one lord and 
master. But beyond this there is no other meaning 
and no other value to be attached to the Messianic 
idea; Jesus himself deprived it of them. 



Christology 153 

With the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah 
the closest possible connexion was established, for 
every devout Jew, between Jesus' message and his 
person ; for it is in the Messiah's activity that God 
Himself comes to His people, and the Messiah who 
does God's work and sits at the right hand of God 
in the clouds of heaven has a right to be worshipped. 
But what attitude did Jesus himself take up towards 
his Gospel ? Does he assume a position in it ? To 
this question there are two answers : one negative 
and one positive. 

In those leading features of it which we described 
in the earlier lectures the whole of the Gospel is 
contained, and we must keep it free from the intru- 
sion of any alien element : God and the soul, the 
soul and its God. There was no doubt in Jesus' 
mind that God could be found, and had been found, 
in the law and the prophets. " He hath showed 
thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the 
Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love 
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" He 
takes the publican in the temple, the widow and her 
mite, the lost son, as his examples; none of them 
know anything about " Christology," and yet by 
his humility the publican was justified. These are 
facts which cannot be turned and twisted without 
doing violence to the grandeur and simplicity of 
Jesus' message in one of its most important aspects. 



154 What is Christianity? 

To contend that Jesus meant his whole message to 
be taken provisionally, and everything in it to re- 
ceive a different interpretation after his death and 
resurrection, nay, parts of it to be put aside as of no 
account, is a desperate supposition. No ! his mes- 
sage is simpler than the churches would like to think 
it; simpler, but for that very reason sterner and en- 
dowed with a greater claim to universality. A man 
cannot evade it by the subterfuge of saying that as 
he can make nothing of this " Christology " the 
message is not for him. Jesus directed men's at- 
tention to great questions; he promised them God's 
grace and mercy; he required them to decide 
whether they would have God or Mammon, an 
eternal or an earthly life, the soul or the body, hu- 
mility or self-righteousness, love or selfishness, the 
truth or a lie. The sphere which these questions 
occupy is all-embracing; the individual is called 
upon to listen to the glad message of mercy and the 
Fatherhood of God, and to make up his mind 
whether he will be on God's side and the Eternal's, 
or on the side of the world and of time. The Gos- 
pel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father 
only and not with the Son. This is no paradox, nor, 
on the other hand, is it " rationalism," but the sim- 
ple expression of the actual fact as the evangelists 
give it. 

But no one had ever yet known the Father in the 



Christology 155 

way in which Jesus knew Him, and to this know- 
ledge of Him he draws other men's attention, and 
thereby does "the many" an incomparable service. 
He leads them to God, not only by what he says, 
but still more by what he is and does, and ultim- 
ately by what he suffers. It was in this sense 
that he spoke the words, " Come unto me, all ye 
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest " ; as also, " The Son of Man came not to 
be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his 
life a ransom for many." He knows that through 
him a new epoch is beginning, in which, by their 
knowledge of God, the " least " shall be greater 
than the greatest of the ages before ; he knows that 
in him thousands — the very individuals who are 
weary and heavy laden — will find the Father and 
gain life ; he knows that he is the sower who is scat- 
tering good seed ; his is the field, his the seed, his 
the fruit. These things involve no dogmatic doc- 
trines; still less any transformation of the Gospel 
itself, or any oppressive demands upon our faith. 
They are the expression of an actual fact which he 
perceives to be already happening, and which, with 
prophetic assurance, he beholds in advance. When, 
under the terrible burden of his calling and in the 
midst of the struggle, he comes to see that it is 
through him that the blind see, the lame walk, the 
deaf hear, the poor have the Gospel preached to 



i5 6 What is Christianity? 

them, he begins to comprehend the glory which the 
Father has given him. And he sees that what he 
now suffers in his person will, through his life 
crowned in death, remain a fact efficacious and of 
critical importance for all time : He is the way to 
the Father ; and as he is the appointed of the Father, 
so he is the judge as well. 

Was he mistaken ? Neither his immediate pos- 
terity, nor the course of subsequent history, has de- 
cided against him. It is not as a mere factor that 
he is connected with the Gospel ; he was its personal 
realisation and its strength, and this he is felt to be 
still. Fire is kindled only by fire; personal life 
only by personal forces. Let us rid ourselves of 
all dogmatic sophistry, and leave others to pass 
verdicts of exclusion. The Gospel nowhere says 
that God's mercy is limited to Jesus' mission. 
But history shows us that he is the one who brings 
the weary and heavy laden to God ; and, again, that 
he it was who raised mankind to the new level; 
and his teaching is still the touchstone, in that it 
brings men to bliss and brings them to judgment. 

The sentence " I am the Son of God " was not 
inserted in the Gospel by Jesus himself, and to put 
that sentence there side by side with the others is 
to make an addition to the Gospel. But no one 
who accepts the Gospel, and tries to understand 
him who gave it to us, can fail to affirm that here 



The Creed 157 

the divine appeared in as pure a form as it can ap- 
pear on earth, and to feel that for those who fol- 
lowed him Jesus was himself the strength of the 
Gospel. What they experienced, however, and 
came to know in and through him, they have told 
the world ; and their message is still a living force. 

(6) . The Gospel and doctrine ', or the question of creed. 

We need not dwell long on this question, as on 
the essential points — everything that it is necessary 
to say has already been said in the course of our 
previous observations. 

The Gospel is no theoretical system of doctrine 
or philosophy of the universe ; it is doctrine only in 
so far as it proclaims the reality of God the Father. 
It is a glad message assuring us of life eternal, and 
telling us what the things and the forces with which 
we have to do are worth. By treating of life eter- 
nal it teaches us how to lead our lives aright. It 
tells us of the value of the human soul, of humility, 
of mercy, of purity, of the cross, and the worthless- 
ness of worldly goods and anxiety for the things of 
which earthly life consists. And it gives the assur- 
ance that, in spite of every struggle, peace, certainty, 
and something within that can never be destroyed 
will be the crown of a life rightly led. What else 
can '* the confession of a creed " mean under these 
conditions but to do the will of God, in the cer- 



158 What is Christianity? 

tainty that He is the Father and the one who will 
recompense ? Jesus never spoke of any other kind 
of " creed." Even when he says, " Whosoever 
shall confess me before men, him will I confess also 
before my Father which is in heaven," he is think- 
ing of people doing as he did ; he means the confes- 
sion which shows itself in feeling and action. How 
great a departure from what he thought and 
enjoined is involved in putting a Christological 
creed in the forefront of the Gospel, and in teach- 
ing that before a man can approach it he must learn 
to think rightly about Christ. That is putting the 
cart before the horse. A man can think and teach 
rightly about Christ only if, and in so far as, he has 
already begun to live according to Christ's Gospel. 
There is no forecourt to his message through which 
a man must pass; no yoke which he must first of 
all take upon himself. The thoughts and assurances 
which the Gospel provides are the first thing and 
the last thing, and every soul is directly arraigned 
before them. 

Still less, however, does the Gospel presuppose 
any definite knowledge of nature, or stand in any 
connexion with such knowledge; not even in a 
negative sense can this contention be maintained. 
It is religion and the moral element that are con- 
cerned. The Gospel puts the living God before us. 
Here, too, the confession of Him in belief in Him 



The Creed 159 

and in the fulfilment of His will is the sole thing to 
be confessed ; this is what Jesus Christ meant. So 
far as the knowledge is concerned — and it is vast — 
which may be based upon this belief, it always 
varies with the measure of a man's inner develop- 
ment and subjective intelligence. But to possess 
the Lord of heaven and earth as a Father is an ex- 
perience to which nothing else approaches; and it 
is an experience which the poorest soul can have, 
and to the reality of which he can bear testimony. 

An experience — it is only the religion which a 
man has himself experienced that is to be confessed ; 
every other creed or confession is in Jesus' view 
hypocritical and fatal. If there is no broad 
" theory of religion " to be found in the Gospel, 
still less is there any direction that a man is to 
begin by accepting and confessing any ready-made 
theory. Faith and creed are to proceed and grow 
up out of the all-important act of turning from the 
world and to God, and creed is to be nothing but 
faith reduced to practice. " All men have not 
faith," says the apostle Paul, but all men ought to 
be veracious and be on their guard in religion 
against lip-service and light-hearted assent to 
creeds. " A certain man had two sons; and he 
came to the first and said, Son, go work to-day in 
my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not; 
but afterward he repented and went. And he came 



160 What is Christianity? 

to the second, and said likewise. And he an- 
swered and said, I go, sir; and went not." 

I might stop here, but I am impelled to answer 
one more objection. The Gospel, it is said, is a 
great and sublime thing, and it has certainly been 
a saving power in history, but it is indissolubly 
connected with an antiquated view of the world 
and history; and, therefore, although it be painful 
to say so, and we have nothing better to put in its 
place, it has lost its validity and can have no 
further significance for us. In view of this objec- 
tion there are two things which I should like to 
say :— 

Firstly, no doubt it is true that the view of the 
world and history with which the Gospel is con- 
nected is quite different from ours, and that view 
we cannot recall to life, and would not if we could ; 
but " indissoluble " the connexion is not. I have 
tried to show what the essential elements in the 
Gospel are, and these elements are " timeless." 
Not only are they so; but the man to whom the 
Gospel addresses itself is also " timeless," that is to 
say, he is the man who, in spite of all progress and 
development, never changes in his inmost constitu- 
tion and in his fundamental relations with the 
external world. Since that is so, this Gospel re- 
mains in force, then, for us too. 



The Gospel 161 

Secondly, the Gospel is based — and this is the 
all-important element in the view which it takes of 
the world and history — upon the antithesis between 
Spirit and flesh, God and the world, good and evil. 
Now, in spite of ardent efforts, thinkers have not yet 
succeeded in elaborating on a monistic basis any 
theory of ethics that is satisfactory and answers to 
the deepest needs of man. Nor will they succeed. 
In the end, then, it is essentially a matter of indif- 
ference what name we give to the opposition with 
which every man of ethical feeling is concerned : 
God and the world, the Here and the Beyond, the 
visible and the invisible, matter and spirit, the life 
of impulse and the life of freedom, physics and 
ethics. That there is a unity underlying this op- 
position is a conviction which can be gained by ex- 
perience ; the one realm can be subordinated to the 
other; but it is only by a struggle that this unity 
can be attained, and when it is attained it takes 
the form of a problem that is infinite and only ap- 
proximately soluble. It cannot be attained by any 
refinement of a mechanical process. It is by self- 
conquest that a man is freed from the tyranny of 
matter — 

Von der Gewall die alle Wesen bindet 
Befreit der Mensch sick der sick iiberwindet. 

This saying of Goethe's excellently expresses the 
truth that is here in question. It is a truth which 



1 62 What is Christianity ? 

holds good for all time, and it forms the essential 
element in the dramatic pictures of contemporary 
life in which the Gospel exhibits the antithesis that 
is to be overcome. I do not know how our in- 
creased knowledge of nature is to hinder us from 
bearing witness to the truth of the creed that 
" The world passeth away, and the lust thereof, 
but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever." 
We have to do with a dualism which arose we 
know not how; but as moral beings we are con- 
vinced that, as it has been given us in order that 
we may overcome it in ourselves and bring it to a 
unity, so also it goes back to an original unity, and 
will at last find its reconciliation in the great far- 
off event, the realised dominion of the Good. 

Dreams, it may be said ; for what we see before 
our eyes is something very different. No! not 
dreams — after all it is here that our true life has its 
root — but patchwork certainly, for we are unable to 
bring our knowledge in space and time, together 
with the contents of our inner life, into the unity 
of a philosophic theory of the world. It is only in 
the peace of God which passeth all understanding 
that this unity dawns upon us. 

But we have already passed beyond the limits of 
our immediate task. We proposed to acquaint 
ourselves with the Gospel in its fundamental feat- 
ures and in its most important bearings. I have 



The Gospel 163 

tried to respond to this task; but the last point 
which we touched takes us beyond it. We now 
return to it, in order to follow, in the second part 
of these lectures, the course of the Christian re- 
ligion through history. 



LECTURE IX 

THE task before us in the second half of these 
lectures is to exhibit the history of the Christ- 
ian religion in its leading phases, and to examine 
its development in the apostolic age, in Catholic- 
ism, and in Protestantism. 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THE APOSTOLIC 
AGE 

The inner circle of the disciples, the band of 
twelve whom Jesus had gathered around him, 
formed itself into a community. He himself 
founded no community in the sense of an organised 
union for divine worship — he was only the teacher 
and the disciples were the pupils ; but the fact that 
the band of pupils at once underwent this trans- 
formation became the ground upon which all sub- 
sequent developments rested. What were the 
characteristic features of this society ? Unless I 
am mistaken there were three factors at work in it : 
(i.) The recognition of Jesus as the living Lord ; 
(ii.) the fact that in every individual member of 
the new community — including the very slaves — 

164 



The Apostolic Age 165 

religion was an actual experience, and involved the 
consciousness of a living union with God; (iii.) the 
leading of a holy life in purity and brotherly fellow- 
ship, and the expectation of the Christ* s return in 
the near future. 

By keeping these three factors in view we can 
grasp the distinctive characters of the new commun- 
ity. Let us look at them more closely. 

1. Jesus Christ the Lord. — In thus confessing 
their belief in him his disciples took the first step in 
continuing their recognition of him as the author- 
itative teacher, of his word as their permanent 
standard of life, of their desire to keep " everything 
that he commanded them." But this does not ex- 
press the full meaning attaching to the words " the 
Lord "; nay, it is far from touching their peculiar 
significance. The primitive community called Jesus 
its Lord because he had sacrificed his life for it, 
and because its members were convinced that he 
had been raised from the dead and was then sitting 
on the right hand of God. There is no historical 
fact more certain than that the apostle Paul was 
not, as we might perhaps expect, the first to em- 
phasise so prominently the significance of Christ's 
death and resurrection, but that in recognising 
their meaning he stood exactly on the same ground 
as the primitive community. " I delivered unto 
you first of all," he wrote to the Corinthians, "that 



1 66 What is Christianity? 

which I also received, how that Christ died for our 
sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was 
buried, and that he rose again the third day." 
Paul did, it is true, make Christ's death and resur- 
rection the subject of a particular speculative idea, 
and, so to speak, reduced the whole of the Gospel 
to these events ; but they were already accepted as 
fundamental facts by the circle of Jesus' personal 
disciples and by the primitive community. In these 
two facts it may be said that the permanent re- 
cognition of Jesus Christ, and the reverence and 
adoration which he received, obtained their first 
hold. They formed the ground on which the whole 
Christ ological theory rested. But within two gen- 
erations from his death Jesus Christ was already 
put upon the highest plane upon which men can 
put him. As men were conscious of him as the 
living Lord, he was glorified as the one who had 
been raised to the right hand of God and had van- 
quished death ; as the Prince of Life, as the strength 
of a new existence, as the way, the truth, and the 
life. The Messianic ideas permitted of his being 
placed upon God's throne, without endangering 
monotheism. But, above all, he was felt to be the 
active principle of individual life: " It is not I that 
live, but Christ that liveth in me"; he is "my" 
life, and to press onwards to him through death is 
great gain. Where can we find in the history of 



The Expiatory Sacrifice 167 

mankind any similar instance of men eating and 
drinking with their master, seeing him in the char- 
acteristic aspects of his humanity, and then pro- 
claiming him not only as the great prophet and 
revealer of God, but as the divine disposer of his- 
tory, as the " beginning" of God's creation, and 
as the inner strength of a new life ! It was not thus 
that Mohammed's disciples spoke of their prophet. 
Neither is it sufficient to assert that the Messianic 
predicates were simply transferred to Jesus, and 
that everything may be explained by Jesus' ex- 
pected return in glory throwing its radiance back- 
wards. True, in the certain hope of Jesus' return, 
his "coming in lowliness" was overlooked; but 
that it was possible to conceive this certain hope 
and hold it fast ; that in spite of suffering and death 
it was possible to see in him the promised Messiah ; 
and that in and side by side with the vulgar Mes- 
sianic image of him, men felt and opened their 
hearts to him as the present Lord and Saviour, — 
that is what is so astonishing! It was just the 
death " for our sins," and the resurrection, which 
confirmed the impression given by his person, and 
provided faith with a sure hold : he died as a sacri- 
fice for us, and he now lives. 

There are many to-day who have come to regard 
both these positions as very strange ; and their atti- 
tude towards them is one of indifference — towards 



1 68 What is Christianity? 

the death, on the ground that no such significance 
can be attributed to a single event of this kind; 
towards the resurrection, because what is here 
affirmed to have happened is incredible. 

It is not our business to defend either the view 
which was taken of the death, or the idea that he 
had risen again; but it is certainly the historian's 
duty to make himself so fully acquainted with both 
positions as to be sensible of the significance which 
they possessed and still possess. That these posi- 
tions were of capital importance for the primitive 
community has never been doubted ; even Strauss 
did not dispute it ; and the great critic, Ferdinand 
Christian Baur, acknowledged that it was on the 
belief in them that the earliest Christian communion 
was built up. It must be possible, then, for us in 
our turn to get a feeling and an understanding for 
what they were ; nay, perhaps we may do more ; if 
we probe the history of religion to the bottom, we 
shall find the truth and justice of ideas which on 
the surface seem so paradoxical and incredible lying 
at the very roots of the faith. 

Let us first consider the idea that Jesus' death 
on the cross was one of expiation. Now, if we 
were to consider the conception attaching to the 
words " expiatory death " in the alien realm of 
formal speculation, we should, it is true, soon find 



The Expiatory Sacrifice 169 

ourselves in a blind alley, and every chance of our 
understanding the idea would vanish. We should 
be absolutely at the end of our tether if we were to 
indulge in speculations as to the necessity which 
can have compelled God to require such a sacrificial 
death. Let us, in the first place, bear in mind a 
fact in the history of religion which is quite univer- 
sal. Those who looked upon this death as a sacri- 
fice soon ceased to offer God any blood-sacrifice at 
all. The value attaching to such sacrifices had, it 
is true, been in doubt for generations, and had been 
steadily diminishing; but it was only now that the 
sacrifices disappeared altogether. They did not 
disappear immediately or at one stroke, — this is a 
point with which we need not concern ourselves 
here, — but their disappearance took place within a 
very brief period and was not delayed until after 
the destruction of the temple. Further, wherever 
the Christian message subsequently penetrated, the 
sacrificial altars were deserted and dealers in sacri- 
ficial beasts found no more purchasers. If there is 
one thing that is certain in the history of religion, 
it is that the death of Christ put an end to all blood- 
sacrifices. But that they are based on a deep re- 
ligious idea is proved by the extent to which they 
existed among so many nations, and they are not 
to be judged from the point of view of cold and 
blind rationalism, but from that of vivid emotion. 



170 What is Christianity? 

If it is obvious that they respond to a religious need ; 
if, further, it is certain that the instinct which led 
to them found its satisfaction and therefore its goal 
in Christ's death ; if, lastly, there was the express 
declaration, as we read in the Epistle to the He- 
brews, that " by one offering he hath perfected for 
ever them that are sanctified," we can no longer 
feel this idea of Christ's sacrifice to be so very 
strange ; for history has decided in its favour, and 
we are beginning to get in touch with it. His 
death had the value of an expiatory sacrifice, for 
otherwise it would not have had strength to pene- 
trate into that inner world in which the blood-sacri- 
fices originated; but it was riot a sacrifice in the 
same sense as the others, or else it could not have 
put an end to them ; it suppressed them by settling 
accounts with them. Nay, we may go further ; the 
validity of all material sacrifices was destroyed by 
Christ's death. Wherever individual Christians or 
whole churches have returned to them, it has been 
a relapse: the earliest Christians knew that the 
whole sacrificial system was thenceforth abolished, 
and if they asked for a reason, they pointed to 
Christ's death. 

In the second place: any one who will look into 
history will find that the sufferings of the pure and 
the just are its saving element ; that is to say, that it 
is not words, but deeds, and not deeds only but self- 



The Expiatory Sacrifice 17 1 

sacrificing deeds, and not only self-sacrificing deeds, 
but the surrender of life itself, that forms the turn- 
ing-point in every great advance in history. In this 
sense I believe that, however far we may stand 
from any theories about vicarious sacrifice, there are 
few of us after all who will mistake the truth and 
inner justice of such a description as we read in 
Isaiah liii. : " Surely he hath borne our griefs and 
carried our sorrows." " Greater love hath no man 
than this, that a man lay down his life for his 
friends" — it is in this light that Jesus' death was 
regarded from the beginning. Wherever any great 
deed has been accomplished in history, the finer a 
man's moral feelings are, the more sensible will he 
be of vicarious suffering; the more he will bring 
that suffering into relation to himself. Did Luther 
in the monastery strive only for himself ? — was it 
not for us all that he inwardly bled when he fought 
with the religion that was handed down to him ? 
But it was by the cross of Jesus Christ that man- 
kind gained such an experience of the power of 
purity and love true to death that they can never 
forget it, and that it signifies a new epoch in their 
history. 

Finally, in the third place: no reflection of the 
" reason," no deliberation of the " intelligence," 
will ever be able to expunge from the moral ideas 
of mankind the conviction that injustice and sin 



17 2 What is Christianity? 

deserve to be punished, and that everywhere that 
the just man suffers, an atonement is made which 
puts us to shame and purifies us. It is a conviction 
which is impenetrable, for it comes out of those 
depths in which we feel ourselves to be a unity, and 
out of the world which lies behind the world of 
phenomena. Mocked and denied as though it had 
long perished, this truth is indestructibly preserved 
in the moral experience of mankind. These are the 
ideas which from the beginning onwards have been 
roused by Christ's death, and have, as it were, 
played around it. Other ideas have been disen- 
gaged, — ideas of less importance but, nevertheless, 
very efficacious at times, — but these are the most 
powerful. They have taken shape in the firm con- 
viction that by his death in suffering he did a 
definitive work; that he did it *'• for us." Were we 
to attempt to measure and register what he did, as 
was soon attempted, we should fall into dreadful 
paradoxes ; but we can in our turn feel it for our- 
selves with the same freedom with which it was 
originally felt. If we also consider that Jesus him- 
self described his death as a service which he was 
rendering to many, and that by a solemn act he in- 
stituted a lasting remembrance of it — I see no 
reason to doubt the fact — we can understand how 
this death and the shame of the cross were bound 
to take the central place. 



The Resurrection 173 

Jesus, however, was proclaimed as " the Lord " 
not only because he had died for sinners but be- 
cause he was the risen and the living one. If the 
resurrection meant nothing but that a deceased 
body of flesh and blood came to life again, we 
should make short work of this tradition. But it is 
not so. The New Testament itself distinguishes 
between the Easter message of the empty grave 
and the appearances of Jesus on the one side, and 
the Easter faith on the other. Although the great- 
est value is attached to that message, we are to 
hold the Easter faith even in its absence. The 
story of Thomas is told for the exclusive purpose of 
impressing upon us that we must hold the Easter 
faith even without the Easter message: " Blessed 
are they that have not seen and yet have believed." 
The disciples on the road to Emmaus were blamed 
for not believing in the resurrection even though 
the Easter message had not yet reached them. 
The Lord is a Spirit, says Paul; and this carries 
with it the certainty of his resurrection. The Easter 
message tells us of that wonderful event in Joseph 
of Arimathaea's garden, which, however, no eye 
saw ; it tells us of the empty grave into which a few 
women and disciples looked ; of the appearance of 
the Lord in a transfigured form — so glorified that 
his own could not immediately recognise him; it 
soon begins to tell us, too, of what the risen one 



1 74 What is Christianity ? 

said and did. The reports became more and more 
complete, and more and more confident. But the 
Easter faith is the conviction that the crucified one 
gained a victory over death; that God is just and 
powerful ; that he who is the firstborn among many 
brethren still lives. Paul based his Easter faith 
upon the certainty that " the second Adam " was 
from heaven, and upon his experience, on the way 
to Damascus, of God revealing His Son to him as 
still alive. God, he said, revealed him " in me "; 
but this inner revelation was coupled with " a 
vision " overwhelming as vision never was after- 
wards. Did the apostle know of the message about 
the empty grave ? While there are theologians of 
note who doubt it, I think it probable ; but we can- 
not be quite certain about it. Certain it is that 
what he and the disciples regarded as all-important 
was not the state in which the grave was found, but 
Christ's appearances. But who of us can maintain 
that a clear account of these appearances can be 
constructed out of the stories told by Paul and the 
evangelists ; and if that be impossible, and there is 
no tradition of single events which is quite trust- 
worthy, how is the Easter faith to be based on 
them ? Either we must decide to rest our belief 
on a foundation unstable and always exposed to 
fresh doubts, or else we must abandon this founda- 
tion altogether, and with it the miraculous appeal 



The Resurrection 175 

to our senses. But here, too, the images of the 
faith have their roots in truth and reality. What- 
ever may have happened at the grave and in the 
matter of the appearances, one thing is certain : 

This grave was the birthplace of the indestructible be- 
lief that death is vanquished, and there is a life 
eternal. It is useless to cite Plato ; it is useless to 
point to the Persian religion, and the ideas and the 
literature of later Judaism. All that would have 
perished and has perished; but the certainty of the 
resurrection and of a life eternal which is bound up 
with the grave in Joseph's garden has not perished, 
and on the conviction that Jesus lives we still base 
those hopes of citizenship in an Eternal City which 
make our earthly life worth living and tolerable. 

' He delivered them who through fear of death 
were all their lifetime subject to bondage," as the 
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews confesses. 
That is the point. And although there be excep- 
tions to its sway, wherever, despite all the weight 
of nature, there is a strong faith in the infinite value 
of the soul; wherever death has lost its terrors; 
wherever the sufferings of the present are measured 
against a future of glory, this feeling of life is bound 
up with the conviction that Jesus Christ has passed 
through death, that God has awakened him and 
raised him to life and glory. What else can we be- 
lieve but that the earliest disciples also found the 



1 76 What is Christianity ? 

ultimate foundation of their faith in the living Lord 
to be the strength which had gone out from him ? 
It was a life never to be destroyed which they felt 
to be going out from him; only for a brief. span of 
time could his death stagger them; the strength of 
the Lord prevailed over everything; God did not 
give him over to death ; he lives as the first-fruits 
of those who have fallen asleep. It is not by any 
speculative ideas of philosophy but by the vision of 
Jesus' life and death and by the feeling of his im- 
perishable union with God that mankind, so far as 
it believes in these things, has attained to that cer- 
tainty of eternal life for which it was meant, and 
which it dimly discerns — eternal life in time and 
beyond time. This feeling first established faith in 
the value of personal life. But of every attempt to 
demonstrate the certainty of " immortality " by 
logical process, we may say in the words of the 
poet: 

Believe and venture : as for pledges, 
The gods give none. 

Belief in the living Lord and in a life eternal is the 
act of the freedom which is born of God. 

As the crucified and risen one Jesus was the 
Lord. While this confession of belief in him ex- 
pressed a man's whole relation to him, it also af- 
forded endless matter for thought and speculation. 
This conception of the " Lord " came to embrace 



The Holy Ghost 177 

the many-sided image of the Messiah and all the 
Old Testament prophecies of a similar kind. But 
as yet no ecclesiastical " doctrines " about him had 
been elaborated ; everyone who acknowledged him 
as the Lord belonged to the community. 

2. Religion as an actual experience. — The second 
characteristic feature of the primitive community is 
that every individual in it, even the very slaves, 
possess a living experience of God. This is suffi- 
ciently remarkable; for at first sight we might 
think that all this devotion to Christ, and this un- 
conditional reverence for him, must necessarily have 
resulted in all religion becoming a punctilious sub- 
jection to his words, and so a kind of voluntary 
servitude. But the Pauline epistles and the Acts 
of the Apostles give us quite a different picture. 
While they do, indeed, attest the fact that Jesus' 
words were held in unqualified reverence, this fact 
is not the most prominent feature in the picture of 
earliest Christendom. What is much more charac- 
teristic is that individual Christians, moved by the 
Spirit of God, are placed in a living and entirely 
personal relation to God Himself. Dr. Weinel has 
lately presented us with a fine work on the Work- 
ings of the Spirit and the Spirits in the Post-Apostolic 
Age. It contains many passages which take us back 
to the apostolic age and treat in greater detail of 



i7 8 What is Christianity? 

the matters which Professor Gunkel has so impress- 
ively placed before us in his treatise on The Holy 
Ghost, The neglected problems of the extent to 
which, and the forms in which, the Spirit exercised 
an influence on the life of the early Christians, and 
of the view to be taken of the phenomena connected 
with this influence, are admirably discussed by Dr. 
Weinel. In substance, his conclusion is that the 
expressions " receiving " and " acting by" the Holy 
Ghost signify such an independence and immediacy 
of religious life and feeling, and such an inner union 
with God, perceived to be the mightiest reality, as 
could not have been expected from strict subjection 
to Jesus' authority. To be the child of God and to 
be gifted with the Spirit are simply the same as 
being a disciple of Christ. That a man is not truly 
a disciple unless he is pervaded by God's Spirit is 
a point which the Acts of the Apostles fully 
recognises. The pouring out of the Holy Spirit is 
placed in the forefront of the narrative. The au- 
thor is conscious that the Christian religion would 
not be the highest and the ultimate religion unless 
it brought every individual into an immediate and 
living connexion with God. This mutual union of 
a full, obedient subjection to the Lord with freedom 
in the Spirit is the most important feature in the 
distinctive character of this religion, and the seal of 
its greatness. The workings of the Spirit were 



The Holy Ghost 179 

shown everywhere, in the entire domain of the five 
senses, in the sphere of will and action, in profound 
philosophical speculation, and in the most delicate 
appreciation of the facts of the moral life. The 
elementary forces of the religious temperament, 
long held in check by systems of doctrine and the 
ceremonies of public worship, were again set free. 
They showed themselves in ecstatic phenomena, in 
signs and wonders, in an enhancement of all the 
functions of life, down to conditions of a pathologi- 
cal and suspicious character. The fact, however, 
was not forgotten, — and where it threatened to be 
obscured it was strongly impressed on people's at- 
tention, — that those strange and violent phenomena 
were individual, but that side by side with them 
there are workings of the Spirit which are bestowed 
upon everyone and with which no one can dispense. 
But " The fruit of the Spirit," as the apostle Paul 
writes, " is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentle- 
ness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." The 
other feature in the distinctive character and great- 
ness of this religion is that it does not overestimate 
the elementary strength which gave it birth ; that 
it makes its spiritual purport and its discipline 
triumph over all states of ecstasy ; and that it holds 
immovably to its conviction that the Spirit of 
God, however it may reveal itself, is a Spirit of 
holiness and of love. But here we have already 



180 What is Christianity? 

passed to the third feature which characterises early 
Christendom. 



3. The third feature is the leading of a holy life 
in purity and brotherly fellowship and in the ex- 
pectation of Christ's speedy return. The course 
which the history of the Church followed resulted 
in the dogmatic details in the New Testament 
being selected for investigation, rather than those 
parts of it which depicted the life of the first 
Christians and exhorted men to morality. And 
yet not only are the New Testament epistles largely 
taken up with these moral exhortations, but not a 
few of the so-called dogmatic portions were also 
written solely for moral admonition. Jesus directed 
his disciples to give these exhortations the first 
place, and the earliest Christians were well aware 
that the first business of life was to do the will of 
God and present themselves as a holy community. 
Upon this their whole existence and their mission 
in the world were based. There were two points 
which, in accordance with Jesus' teaching, they put 
first and foremost, and they were points which at 
bottom embraced the whole range of moral action : 
purity and brotherly fellowship. They took purity 
in the deepest and most comprehensive sense of the 
word, as the horror of everything that is unholy, 
and as the inner pleasure in everything that is up- 



The Community of Brothers 181 

right and true, lovely and of good report. They 
also meant purity in regard to the body: " Know 
ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy 
Ghost which is in you ? therefore glorify God in 
your body." In this sublime consciousness the 
earliest Christians took up the struggle against the 
sins of impurity, which in the heathen world were 
not accounted sins at all. As sons of God, " blame- 
less and harmless in the midst of a crooked and 
perverse nation," they were to "shine as lights in 
the world." It was thus that they were to show of 
what they were made, and it was thus that they 
showed it : to be holy as God was holy, to be pure 
as disciples of Christ. Here, too, we get the meas- 
ure of the renunciation of the world which this 
community imposed upon itself. " To keep one- 
self unspotted from the world " was the asceticism 
which it practised itself and required of its adher- 
ents. The other point is brotherly fellowship. In 
joining the love of God with the love of neighbour 
in his sayings, Jesus himself had a new union of 
men with one another in view. The earliest Christ- 
ians understood him. From the very first they 
constituted themselves into a brotherly union, not 
in word only but in deed — a living realisation of 
what he meant. In calling themselves " brothers," 
they felt all the obligations which the name imposes 
and tried to come up to them, not by legal 



1 82 What is Christianity? 

regulations but by voluntary service, each according 
to the measure of his own powers and gifts. The 
Acts of the Apostles tell us that in Jerusalem they 
went so far as to have a voluntary community of 
goods. Paul says nothing about it ; and if we are 
to accept this obscure report as really trustworthy, 
then neither Paul nor the Christian communities 
among the Gentiles took pattern by the enterprise. 
They seem not to have been required, nor to have 
thought it desirable, to order their lives afresh in 
externals. The brotherly fellowship which " the 
holy " were to cultivate, and did cultivate, was dis- 
tinguished by two principles: " Whether one mem- 
ber suffer, all the members suffer with it," and 
" Bear ye one another's burdens and so fulfil the 
law of Christ." 



LECTURE X 

IT was as their Lord that the primitive community 
of Christians believed in Jesus. They thus ex- 
pressed their absolute devotion to, and confidence 
in, him as the Prince of Life. As every individual 
Christian stood in an immediate relation to God 
through the Spirit, priests and mediations were no 
longer wanted. Finally, these " holy " people 
were drawn together into societies, which bound 
themselves to a strictly moral life in purity and 
brotherly fellowship. On the last point let me add 
a few words. 

It is a proof of the inwardness and moral power 
of the new message that, in spite of the enthus- 
iasm arising from personal experience of religion, 
there were relatively seldom any extravagant 
outbursts and violent movements to be combated. 
Such movements may have been more frequent 
than the direct declarations of our authorities 
allow us to suppose, but they did not form the 
rule; and when they arose Paul was certainly not 
the only one who was concerned to put them down. 
He had certainly no wish to quench the " Spirit," 

183 



1 84 What is Christianity? 

but when enthusiasm threatened to lead to a re- 
pugnance to work, as in Thessalonica, or when, as 
in Corinth, there was a superabundance of ecstatic 
talk, he uttered some sober warnings: " If any 
would not work, neither should he eat," and " I 
had rather speak five words with my understand- 
ing, that by my voice I might teach others also, 
than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue." 
Still more plainly are the concentrated repose and 
power of the leaders shown in the moral admoni- 
tions, such as we get not only in the Pauline 
epistles but also, for example, in the First Epistle of 
Peter and in the general Epistle of James. Christian 
character is to show itself in the essential circum- 
stances of human life, and that life is to be invigor- 
ated, supported, and illumined by the Spirit. In 
the relation of husband to wife and of wife to hus- 
band, of parents to children, of masters to servants; 
further, in the individual's relation to constituted 
authority, to the surrounding heathen world, and, 
again, to the widow and the orphan, is " the service 
of God " to be proved and tested. Where have we 
another example in history of a religion intervening 
with such a robust supernatural consciousness, and 
at the same time laying the moral foundations of 
the earthly life of the community so firmly as this 
message ? If a man fails to be inwardly affected by 
the faith proclaimed by the New Testament writers, 



The Community of Brothers 185 

he must certainly be stirred to the depths by the 
purity, the wealth, the power, and the delicacy of 
the moral knowledge which invests their exhorta- 
tions with such incomparable value. 

There is another feature of the life of the earliest 
Christians which also deserves notice in this con- 
nexion. They lived in the expectation of Christ's 
near return. This hope supplied them with an 
extraordinarily strong motive for disregarding 
earthly things, and the joys and sufferings of this 
world. That they were mistaken in their expecta- 
tion we must freely grant ; but nevertheless it was 
a highly efficacious lever for raising them above the 
world, and teaching them to make little of small 
things and much of great things, and to distinguish 
between what is of time and what is of eternity. 
For a new and powerful religious impulse, which 
effects its own influence, to be associated with 
another factor which enhances and strengthens that 
influence, is what we see constantly happening in 
the history of religion. With every renewal of the 
religious experience of sin and grace since August- 
ine's day, what a lever has been supplied by the 
idea of predestination, and yet it is an idea which is 
in no way derived from that experience itself. 
How much enthusiasm was inspired in Cromwell's 
troops, and how greatly were the Puritans on both 
sides of the ocean strengthened by the consciousness 



1 86 What is Christianity? 

of adoption, although this consciousness, too, was 
only an adjunct. When the religious experiences 
of St. Francis developed in the Middle Ages into a 
new form of devotion, how much assistance it re- 
ceived from the doctrine of poverty, and yet this 
doctrine was an independent force. The conviction 
which obtained in the apostolic age that the Lord 
had really appeared after his death on the cross 
may also be regarded in the same light. What we 
are thus taught is that the most inward of all pos- 
sessions, namely, religion, does not struggle up 
into life free and isolated, but grows, so to speak, 
in coverings of bark and cannot grow without 
them. In studying the apostolic age, however, it 
is important to observe that, not only in spite of the 
religious enthusiasm but even in spite of the intense 
eschatological hopes which prevailed, the task of 
making earthly life holy was not neglected. 

The three principles which we have emphasised 
as contributing most to the characteristic features 
of primitive Christianity could also, if necessary, 
have been brought to bear within the framework of 
Judaism and in connexion withVthe synagogue. 
There, too, Jesus could have been acknowledged 
as the Lord, the new experience united with the 
ancestral religion, and the society of brothers de- 
veloped in the form of a Jewish conventicle. In 



Christ's Return 187 

Palestine, as a matter of fact, this was the form 
which the earliest communities took. But the new 
principles displayed great vigour and pointed far 
beyond Judaism : Jesus Christ the Lord is not only 
Israel's Lord, but the Lord of history, the Lord of 
all men. The new experience of a direct union 
with God makes the old worship with its priests and 
mediations unnecessary. The society of brothers 
towers over all other associations, and deprives 
them of any value. The inner development which 
the new tendency virtually comprised began at once : 
Paul was not the first to start it; before and side by 
side with him there were obscure and nameless 
Christians in the Dispersion who took up Gentiles 
into the new society. They did away with the 
particularistic and statutory regulations of the law 
by declaring that they were to be understood in a 
purely spiritual sense and to be interpreted as 
symbols. There was a branch of the Jewish world 
outside Palestine where this declaration had long 
taken actual effect — it is true, on other grounds — 
and where the Jewish religion was being freed from 
its limitations by a process of philosophical inter- 
pretation which was bringing it to the level of a 
spiritual religion for the whole world. This de- 
velopment may be regarded in the light of a pre- 
liminary stage in the history of Christianity, and was 
in many respects really so. It was the stage on 



.A 



1 88 What is Christianity? 

which those nameless Christians entered. It was 
the path upon which a deliverance from historical 
Judaism and its outworn religious ordinances was 
capable of gradual attainment. But one thing is 
certain : it was not the goal of the movement. So 
long as the words " the former religion is done 
away with " remained unspoken, there was always a 
fear that in the next generation the old precepts 
would be brought forward again in their literal 
meaning. How often and often in the history of 
religion has there been a tendency to do away with 
some traditional form of doctrine or ritual which has 
ceased to satisfy inwardly, but to do away with it 
by giving it a new interpretation. The endeavour 
seems to be succeeding ; the temper and the know- 
ledge prevailing at the moment are favourable to it 
— when, lo and behold! the old meaning suddenly 
comes back again. The actual words of the rit- 
ual, of the liturgy, of the official doctrine, prove 
stronger than anything else. If a new religious 
idea cannot manage to make a radical breach with 
the past at the critical point — the rest may remain 
as it is — and procure itself a new " body," it can- 
not last ; it disappears again. There is no tougher 
or more conservative fabric than a properly consti- 
tuted religion ; it can only yield to a higher phase 
by being abolished. No permanent effect, then, 
could be expected in the apostolic age from the 



The Dispersion 189 

twisting and turning of the law so as to make room 
for the new faith side by side with it, or so as to 
approximate the old religion to that faith. Some- 
one had to stand up and say, " The old one is done 
away with " ; he had to brand any further pursuit 
of it as a sin ; he had to show that all things were 
become new. The man who did that was the 
apostle Paul, and it is in having done it that his 
greatness in the history of the world consists. 

Paul is the most luminous personality in the 
history of primitive Christianity, and yet opinions 
differ widely as to his true significance. Only a 
few years ago we had a leading Protestant theo- 
logian asserting that Paul's rabbinical theology led 
him to corrupt the Christian religion. Others, con- 
versely, have called him the real founder of that 
religion But in the opinion of the great majority 
of those who have studied him the true view is that 
he was the one who understood the Master and 
continued his work. This opinion is borne out by 
the facts. Those who blame him for corrupting the 
Christian religion have never felt a single breath of 
his spirit, and judge him only by mere externals, 
such as clothes and book-learning; those who extol 
or criticise him as a founder of religion are forced to 
make him bear witness against himself on the main 
point, and acknowledge that the consciousness 
which bore him up and steeled him for his work 



c: 



190 What is Christianity ? 

was illusory and self-deceptive. As we cannot 
want to be wiser than history, which knows him 
only as Christ's missionary, and as his own words 
clearly attest what his aims were and what he was, 
we regard him as Christ's disciple, as the apostle 
who not only worked harder but also accomplished 
more than all the rest put together. 
I V It was Paul who delivered the Christianreligion 

from Judaism. We shall see how he did that if we 

J ■ 

consicTer the following points : — 

It was Paul who definitely conceived the Gospel 
as the message of the redemption already effected 
and of salvation now present. He preached the 
crucified and risen Christ, who gave us access to 
God and therewith righteousness and peace. 

It was he who confidently regarded the Gos- 
pel as a new force abolishing the religion of the 
law. 

It was he who perceived that religion in its new 
phase pertains to the individual and therefore to all 
individuals; and in this conviction, and with a full 
consciousness of what he was doing, he carried the 
Gospel to the nations of the world and transferred 
it from Judaism to the ground occupied by Greece 
and Rome. Not only are Greeks and Jews to unite 
on the basis of the Gospel, but the Jewish dispensa- 
tion itself is now at an end. That the Gospel was 
transplanted from the East, where in subsequent 



Paul 191 

ages it was never able to thrive properly, to the 
West, is a fact which we owe to Paul. 

It was he who placed the Gospel in the great 
scheme of spirit and flesh, inner and outer exist- 
ence, death and life; he, born a Jew and educated 
a Pharisee, gave it a language \ so that it became 
intelligible, not only to the Greeks but to all men 
generally, and united with the whole of the intel- 
lectual capital which had been amassed in previous 
ages. 

These are the factors that go to make the apostle's 
greatness in the history of religion. On their inner 
connexion I cannot here enter into any detail. But, 
in regard to the first of them, I may remind you of 
the words of the most important historian of religion 
in our day. Wellhausen declares that " PauPs espe- 
cial work was to transform the Gospel of the king- 
dom into the Gospel of Jesus Christ, so that the 
Gospel is no longer the prophecy of the coming of 
the kingdom, but its actual fulfilment by Jesus 
Christ. In his view, accordingly, redemption from 
something in the future has become something 
which has already happened and is now present. 
He lays far more emphasis on faith than on hope ; 
he anticipates the sense of future bliss in the present 
feeling of being God's son; he vanquishes death 
and already leads the new life on earth. He extols 
the strength which is made perfect in weakness ; the 



J 



192 What is Christianity? 

grace of God is sufficient for him, and he knows 
that no power, present or future, can take him from 
His love, and that all things work together for good 
to them that love God/' What knowledge, what 
confidence, what strength, was necessary to tear the 
new religion from its mother earth and plant it in 
an entirely new one! Islam, originating in Arabia, 
has remained the Arabian religion, no matter where 
it may have penetrated. Buddhism has at all times 
been at its purest in India. But] this religion, born 
in Palestine, and confined by its founder to Jewish 
ground, in only a few years after his death was 
severed from that connexion. Paul put it in com- 
petition with the Israelitish religion: " Christ is the 
end of the law." Not only did it bear being thus 
/ rooted up and transplanted, but it showed that it was 
/ meant to be thus transplanted. It gave stay and 
support to the Roman Empire and the whole world 
of Western civilisation. If, as Renan justly ob- 
serves, anyone had told the Roman Emperor in the 
first century that the little Jew who had come from 
Antioch as a missionary was his best collaborator, 
and would put the empire upon a stable basis, he 
would have been regarded as a madman, and yet he 
would have spoken nothing but the truth. Paul 
brought new forces to the Roman Empire, and laid 
the foundations of Western and Christian civilisa- 
tion. Alexander the Great's work has perished ; 



Paul 193 

Paul's has remained. But if we praise the man 
who, without being able to appeal to a single word 
of his Master's, ventured upon the boldest enter- 
prise, by the help of the spirit and with the letter 
against him, we must none the less pay the meed of 
honour to those personal disciples of Jesus who 
after a bitter internal struggle ultimately associated 
themselves with Paul's principles. That Peter did 
so we know for certain ; of others we hear that they 
at least acknowledged their validity. It was, in- 
deed, no insignificant circumstance that men in 
whose ears every word of their Master's was still 
ringing, and in whose recollection the concrete 
features of his personality were still a vivid memory 
— that these faithful disciples should recognise a 
pronouncement to be true which in important points 
seemed to depart from the original message and por- 
tended the downfall of the religion of Israel. What 
was kernel here, and what was husk, history has 
itself showed with unmistakable plainness, and by 
the shortest process. Husk were the whole of the 
Jewish limitations attaching to Jesus' message; 
husk were also such definite statements as " I am 
not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of 
Israel." In the strength of Christ's spirit the dis- 
ciples broke through these barriers. It was his 
personal disciples — not, as we might expect, the 

second or third generation, when the immediate 

13 



194 What is Christianity ? 

memory of the Lord had already paled — who stood 
the great test. That is the most remarkable fact 
of the apostolic age. 

Without doing violence to the inner and essential 
features of the Gospel — unconditional trust in God 
as the Father of Jesus Christ, confidence in the 
Lord, forgiveness of sins, certainty of eternal life, 
purity and brotherly fellowship — Paul transformed 
it into the universal religion, and laid the ground 
for the great Church. But whilst the original 
limitations fell away, new ones of necessity made 
their appearance ; and they modified the simplicity 
and the power of a movement which was from 
within. Before concluding our survey of the apo- 
stolic age, we must direct attention to these modifi- 
cations. 

In the first place : the breach with the Synagogue 
and the founding of entirely independent religious 
communities had well-marked results. Whilst the 
idea was firmly maintained that the community of 
Christ, the " Church," was something suprasensible 
and heavenly, because it came from within, there 
was also a conviction that the Church took visible 
shape in every separate community. As a complete 
breach had taken place, or no connexion been 
established, with the ancient communion, the form- 
ation of entirely new societies was logically invested 
with a special significance, and excited the liveliest 



Paul 195 

interest. In his sayings and parables Jesus, care- 
less of all externals, could devote himself solely to 
the all-important point; but how and in what forms 
the seed would grow was not a question which oc- 
cupied his mind ; he had the people of Israel with 
their historical ordinances before him and was not 
thinking of external changes. But the connexion 
with this people was now severed, and no religious 
movement can remain in a bodiless condition. It 
must elaborate forms for common life and common 
public worship. Such forms, however, cannot be 
improvised ; some of them take shape slowly out of 
concrete necessities; others are derived from the 
environment and from existing circumstances. It 
was in this way that the " Gentile " communities 
procured themselves an organism, a body. The 
forms which they developed were in part independ- 
ent and gradual, and in part based upon the facts 
with which they had to deal. 

But a special measure of value always attaches to 
forms. By being the means by which the commun- 
ity is kept together, the value of that to which they 
minister is insensibly transferred to them; or, at 
least, there is always a danger of this happening. 
One reason for this is that the observance of the 
forms can always be controlled or enforced, as the 
case may be ; whilst for the inner life there is no 
control that cannot be evaded. 



196 What is Christianity ? 

When the breach with the Jewish national com- 
munion had once taken place, there could be no 
doubt about the necessity for setting up a new 
community in opposition to it. The self-conscious- 
ness and strength of the Christian movement was 
displayed in the creation of a Church which knew 
itself to be the true Israel. But the founding of 
churches and " the Church " on earth brought an 
entirely new interest into the field ; what came from 
within was joined by something that came from 
without; law, discipline, regulations for ritual and 
doctrine, were developed, and began to assert a 
position by a logic of their own. The measure of 
value applicable to religion itself no longer re- 
mained the only measure, and with a hundred in- 
visible threads religion was insensibly worked into 
the net of history. 

In the second place : we have already referred to 
the fact that it was, above all, in his Christology that 
Paul's significance as a teacher consisted. In his 
view — we see this as well by the way in which he 
illuminated the death on the cross and the resur- 
rection as by his equation, " the Lord is a Spirit " 
— the Redemption is already accomplished and sal- 
vation a present power. " God hath reconciled us 
to himself through Jesus Christ " ; " If any man be 
in Christ, he is a new creature " ; " Who shall se- 
parate us from the love of God ? " The absolute 



Paul 197 

character of the Christian religion is thus made 
clear. But it may also be observed in this connex- 
ion that every attempt to formulate a theory has a 
logic of its own and dangers of its own. There 
was one danger which the apostle himself had to 
combat, that of men claiming to be redeemed with- 
out giving practical proof of the new life. In the 
case of Jesus' sayings no such danger could arise, 
but Paul's formulas were not similarly protected. 
That men are not to rely upon " redemption," for- 
giveness of sin, and justification, if the hatred of 
sin and the imitation of Christ be lacking, inevitably 
became in subsequent ages a standing theme with 
all earnest teachers. Who can fail to recognise 
that the doctrines of " objective redemption " have 
been the occasion of grievous temptations in the 
history of the Church, and for whole generations 
concealed the true meaning of religion ? The con- 
ception of " redemption," which cannot be inserted 
in Jesus' teaching in this free and easy way at all, 
became a snare. No doubt it is true that Christian- 
ity is the religion of redemption ; but the conception 
is a delicate one, and must never be taken out of 
the sphere of personal experience and inner re- 
formation. 

But here we are met by a second danger closely 
connected with the first. If redemption is to be 
traced to Christ's person and work, everything 



19S What is Christianity? 

would seem to depend upon a right understanding 
of this person together with what he accomplished. 
The formation of a correct theory of and about 
Christ threatens to assume the position of chief im- 
portance, and to pervert the majesty and simplicity 
of the Gospel. Here, again, the danger is of a 
kind such as cannot arise with Jesus' sayings. Even 
in John we read: " If ye love me, keep my com- 
mandments/' But with the way in which Paul 
defined the theory of religion, the danger can 
certainly arise and did arise. No long period 
elapsed before it was taught in the Church that the 
all-important thing is to know how the person of 
Jesus was constituted, what sort of physical nature 
he had, and so on. Paul himself is far removed 
from this position, — " Whoso calleth Christ Lord 
speaketh by the Holy Ghost," — but the way in 
which he ordered his religious conceptions, as the 
outcome of his speculative ideas, unmistakably 
exercised an influence in a wrong direction. That, 
however great the attraction which his way of 
ordering them may possess for the understanding, 
it is a perverse proceeding to make Christology the 
fundamental substance of the Gospel is shown by 
Christ's teaching, which is everywhere directed to 
the all-important point, and summarily confronts 
every man with his God. This does not affect 
Paul's right to epitomise the Gospel in the message 



Paul 199 

of Christ crucified, thus exhibiting God's power and 
God's wisdom, and in the love of Christ kindling 
the love of God. There are thousands to-day in 
whom the Christian faith is still propagated in the 
same manner, namely, through Christ. But to 
demand assent to a series of propositions about 
Christ's person is a different thing altogether. 

There is, however, another point to be considered 
here. Under the influence of the Messianic dog- 
mas, and led by the impression which Christ made, 
Paul became the author of the speculative idea that 
not only was God in Christ, but that Christ himself 
was possessed of a peculiar nature of a heavenly 
kind. With the Jews, this was not a notion that 
necessarily shattered the framework of the Messianic 
idea; but with the Greeks it inevitably set an en- 
tirely new theory in motion. Christ's appearance 
in itself, the entrance of a divine being into the 
world, came of necessity to rank as the chief fact, 
as itself the real redemption. Paul did not, indeed, 
himself look upon it in this light; for him the 
crucial facts are the death on the cross and the 
resurrection, and he regards Christ's entrance into 
the world from an ethical point of view and as an 
example for us to follow: " For our sakes he be- 
came poor " ; he humbled himself and renounced 
the world. But this state of things could not last. 
The fact of redemption could not permanently 



200 What is Christianity ? 

occupy the second place; it was too large. But 
when moved into the first place it threatened the 
very existence of the Gospel, by drawing away 
men's thoughts and interests in another direction. 
When we look at the history of dogma, who can deny 
that that was what happened^? To what extent 
it happened we shall see in the following lectures. 

In the third place: the new Church possessed a 
sacred book, the Old Testament. Paul, although 
he taught that the law had become of no avail, 
found a means of preserving the whole of the Old 
Testament. What a blessing to the Church this 
book has proved ! As a book of edification, of con- 
solation, of wisdom, of counsel, as a book of his- 
tory, what an incomparable importance it has had 
for Christian life and apologetics! Which of the 
religions that Christianity encountered on Greek or 
Roman ground could boast of a similar book ? Yet 
the possession of this book has not been an un- 
qualified advantage to the Church. To begin with, 
there are many of its pages which exhibit a religion 
and a morality other than Christian. No matter 
how resolutely people tried to spiritualise it and 
give it an inner meaning by construing it in some 
special way, their efforts did not avail to get rid of 
the original sense in its entirety. There was 
always a danger of an inferior and obsolete prin- 
ciple forcing its way into Christianity through the 






Paul 20 1 

Old Testament. This, indeed, was what actually 
occurred. Nor was it only in individual aspects 
that it occurred : the whole aim was changed. 
Moreover, on the new ground religion was intim- 
ately connected with a political power, namely, with 
nationality. How if people were seduced into 
again seeking such a connexion, not, indeed, with 
Judaism, but with a new nation, and not with an- 
cient national laws, but with something of an ana- 
logous character ? And when even a Paul here 
and there declared Old Testament laws to be still 
authoritative in spite of their having undergone an 
allegorical transformation, how could anyone re- 
strain his successors from also proclaiming other 
laws, remodelled to suit the circumstances of the 
time, as valid ordinances of God ? This brings 
us to the second point. Although whatever was 
drawn from the Old Testament by way of authori- 
tative precept may have been inoffensive in sub- 
stance, it was a menace to Christian freedom of 
both kinds. It threatened the freedom which 
comes from within, and also the freedom to form 
church communities and to arrange for public wor- 
ship and discipline. 

I have tried to show that the limitations which 
surrounded the Gospel did not cease with the sever- 
ance of the tie binding it to Judaism, but that, on 




202 What is Christianity ? 

the contrary, new limits made their appearance. 
They arose, however, just at the very points upon 
which the necessary progress of things depended, 
or, as the case might be, where an inalienable pos- 
session like the Old Testament was in question. 
Here, again, then, we are reminded of the fact 
that, so far as history is concerned, as soon as we 
leave the sphere of pure inwardness there is no 
progress, no achievement, no advantage of any 
sort that has not its dark side and does not bring 
its disadvantages with it. The apostle Paul com- 
plained that " we know in part." To a much 
greater degree is the same thing true of our actions 
and of everything connected with them. We have 
always to " pay the penalty " of acting, and not 
only take the evil consequences, but also knowingly 
and with open eyes resolutely neglect one thing in 
order to gain another. Our purest and most sacred 
possessions, when they leave the inward realm and 
pass into the world of form and circumstance, are 
no exception to the rule that the very shape which 
they take in action also proves to be their limitation. 

When the great apostle ended his life under 
Nero's axe in the year 64, he could say of himself 
what a short time before he had written to a faith- 
ful comrade: " I have finished my course; I have 
kept the faith." What missionary is there, what 



Paul 203 

preacher, what man entrusted with the cure of 
souls, who can be compared with him, whether in 
the greatness of the task which he accomplished 
or in the holy energy with which he carried it out ? 
He worked with the most living of all messages, 
and kindled a fire ; he cared for his people like a 
father and strove for the souls of others with all the 
forces of his own ; at the same time he discharged 
the duties of the teacher, the schoolmaster, the 
organiser. When he sealed his work by his death, 
the Roman Empire from Antioch as far as Rome, 
nay, as far as Spain, was planted with Christian 
communities. There were to be found in them few 
that were " mighty after the flesh " or of noble de- 
gree, and yet they were as " lights in the world," 
and on them the progress of the world's history 
rested. They had little " illumination," but they 
had acquired the faith in the living God and in a 
life eternal ; they knew that the value of the human 
soul is infinite, and that its value is determined by 
relation to the invisible; they led a life of purity 
and brotherly fellowship, or at least strove after 
such a life. Bound together into a new people in 
Jesus Christ, their head, they were filled with the 
high consciousness that Jews and Greeks, Greeks 
and barbarians, would through them become one, 
and that the last and highest stage in the history of 
humanity had then been reached. 



LECTURE XI 

THE apostolic age now lies behind us. We have 
seen that in the course of it the Gospel was 
detached from the mother soil of Judaism and 
placed upon the broad field of the Graeco-Roman 
Empire. The apostle Paul was the chief agent in 
accomplishing this work, and in thereby giving 
Christianity its place in the history of the world. 
The new connexion which it thus received did not 
in itself denote any restricted activity; on the con- 
trary, the Christian religion was intended to be 
realised in mankind, and mankind at that time 
meant the orbis Romanus. But the new connexion 
involved the development of new forms, and new 
forms also meant limitation and encumbrance. 
We shall see more closely how this was effected if 
we consider 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN ITS DEVELOPMENT 
INTO CATHOLICISM 

The Gospel did not come into the world as a 
statutory religion, and therefore none of the froms 
in which it assumed intellectual and social expres- 

204 



Catholicism 205 

sion — not even the earliest — can be regarded as 
possessing a classical and permanent character. 
The historian must always keep this guiding idea 
before him when he undertakes to trace the course 
of the Christian religion through the centuries from 
the apostolic age downwards. As Christianity rises 
above all antitheses of the Here and the Beyond, 
life and death, work and the shunning of the world, 
reason and ecstasy, Hebraism and Hellenism, it can 
also exist under the most diverse conditions ; just as 
it was originally amid the wreck of the Je wish re- 
ligion that it developed its power. Not only can it 
*so exist— it must do so, if it is to be the religion of 
the living and is itself to live. As a Gospel it has 
only one aim — the finding of the living God, the 
finding of Him by every individual as his God, and 
as the source of strength and joy and peace. How 
this aim is progressively realised through the cent- 
uries — whether with the coefficients of Hebraism 
or Hellenism, of the shunning of the world or of 
civilisation, of Gnosticism or of Agnosticism, of 
ecclesiastical institution or of perfectly free union, 
or by whatever other kinds of bark the core may be 
protected, the sap allowed to rise — is a matter that 
is of secondary moment, that is exposed to change, 
that belongs to the centuries, that comes with them 
and with them perishes. 

Now the greatest transformation which the new 



206 What is Christianity ? 

religion ever experienced — almost greater even than 
that which gave rise to the Gentile Church and 
thrust the Palestinian communities into the back- 
ground—falls in the second century of our era, and 
therefore in the period which we shall consider in 
the present lecture. 

If we place ourselves at about the year 200, about 
a hundred or a hundred and twenty years after the 
apostolic age, — not more than three or four genera- 
tions had gone by since that age came to an end, — 
what kind of spectacle does the Christian religion 
offer ? 

We see a great ecclesiastical and political com- 
munity, and side by side with it numerous " sects " 
calling themselves Christian, but denied the name 
and bitterly opposed. That great ecclesiastical and 
political community presents itself as a league of 
individual communities spanning the empire from 
end to end. Although independent they are all 
constituted essentially alike, and interconnected by 
one and the same law of doctrine, and by fixed rules 
for the purposes of intercommunion. The law of 
doctrine seems at first sight to be of small scope, 
but all its tenets are of the widest significance ; and 
together they embrace a profusion of metaphysical, 
cosmological, and historical problems, give them 
definite answers, and supply particulars of mankind's 
development from the creation up to its future form 



Catholicism 207 

of existence. Jesus' injunctions for the conduct of 
life are not included in this law of doctrine; as the 
"rule of discipline" they were sharply distinguished 
from the '* rule of faith." Each Church, however, 
also presents itself as an institution for public wor- 
ship, where God is honoured in conformity with a 
solemn ritual. The distinction between priests and 
laymen is already a well-marked characteristic of 
this institution ; certain acts of divine worship can be 
performed only by the priest ; his mediation is an 
absolute necessity. It is only by mediation that a 
man can approach God at all, by the mediation of 
right doctrine, right ordinance, and a sacred book. 
The living faith seems to be transformed into a 
creed to be believed ; devotion to Christ, into 
Christology; the ardent hope for the coming of 
" the kingdom," into a doctrine of immortality 
and deification; prophecy, into technical exegesis 
and theological learning; the ministers of the 
Spirit, into clerics; the brothers, into laymen in a 
state of tutelage; miracles and miraculous cures 
disappear altogether, or else are priestly devices; 
fervent prayers become solemn hymns and litanies; 
the " Spirit " becomes law and compulsion. At 
the same time individual Christians are in full touch 
with the life of the world, and the burning question 
is, M In how much of this life may I take part with- 
out losing my position as a Christian ? " This 



208 What is Christianity ? 

enormous transformation took place within a hun- 
dred and twenty years. The first thing which we 
have to determine is, How did that happen ? next, 
Did the Gospel succeed in holding its own amid 
this change, and how did it do so ? 

Before, however, we try to answer these two 
questions, we must call to mind a piece of advice 
which no historian ought ever to neglect. Anyone 
who wants to determine the real value and signific- 
ance of any great phenomenon or mighty product 
of history must first and foremost inquire into the 
work which it accomplished, or, as the case may be, 
into the problem which it solved. As every in- 
dividual has a right to be judged, not by this or 
that virtue or defect, not by his talents or by his 
frailties, but by what he has done, so the great 
edifices of history, the states and the churches, 
must be estimated, first and foremost, we may per- 
haps say exclusively, by what they have achieved. 
It is the work done that forms the decisive test. 
With any other test we are involved in judgments 
of the vaguest kind, now optimistic, now pessimis- 
tic and mere historical twaddle. So here, too, in 
considering the Church as developed into Catholic- 
ism, we must first of all ask, In what did its work 
consist ? What problem did it solve ? What did 
it achieve ? I will answer the last question first. 



Catholicism 209 

It achieved two things : it waged war with nature- 
worship, polytheism, and political religion, and beat 
them back with great energy ; and it exploded the 
dualistic philosophy of religion. Had the Church 
at the beginning of the third century been asked in 
tones of reproach, " How could you recede so far 
from where you began ? To what have you come ? " 
it might have answered: " Yes, it is to this that I 
have come: I have been obliged to discard much 
and admit much ; I have had to fight — my body 
is full of scars, and my clothes are covered with 
dust; but I have won my battles and built my 
house ; I have beaten back polytheism ; I have 
disabled and almost annihilated that monstrous 
abortion, political religion ; I have resisted the 
enticements of a subtle religious philosophy, and 
victoriously encountered it with God, the almighty 
Creator of all things; lastly, I have reared a great 
building, a fortress with towers and bulwarks, where 
I guard my treasure and protect the weak." This 
is the answer which the Church might have given, 
and truthfully given. But, someone may object, 
it was no great achievement to wage war with 
nature-worship and polytheism, and to beat them 
back; they had already rotted and decayed, and 
had little strength left. The objection does not 
hold. Many of the forms in which that species 

of religion had taken shape were, no doubt, 

14 



210 What is Christianity? 

antiquated and approaching extinction, but the re- 
ligion itself, the religion of nature, was a mighty foe. 
It even still avails to beguile our souls and touch our 
heart-strings with effect, when an inspired prophet 
voices its message ; how much more so then ! The 
hymn to the Sun, giving life to all that lives, pro- 
duced a profound and lifelong religious impression 
even upon a Goethe, and made him into a Sun- 
worshipper. But how overpowering it was in the 
days before science had banished the gods from na- 
ture ! Christianity exploded the religion of nature, 
— exploded it not for this or that individual ; that 
was already done, — but exploded it in the sense that 
there was now a large and compact community re- 
futing nature-worship and polytheism by its im- 
pressive doctrines, and affording the deeper religious 
temper stay and support. And then political 
religion! Behind the imperial cult there was the 
whole power of the state, and to come to terms 
with it looked so safe and easy — yet the Church did 
not yield a single inch; it abolished the imperial 
system of state-idols. It was to place an irremov- 
able landmark between religion and politics, be- 
tween God and Caesar, that the martyrs shed their 
blood. Lastly, in an age that was deeply moved 
by questions of religious philosophy, the Church 
maintained a firm front against all the speculative 
ideas of dualism ; and, although these ideas often 



Catholicism 2 1 1 

seemed to approximate closely to its own position, 
it passionately met them with the monotheistic 
view. The struggle here, however, was rendered 
all the harder by the fact that many Christians — 
and just the very prominent and gifted ones too — 
made common cause with the enemy, and them- 
selves embraced the dualistic theory. The Church 
stood firm. If we recollect that, in spite of these 
counter-movements against the Graeco-Roman 
spirit, it also managed to attach this very spirit to 
itself — otherwise than Judaism, of whose dealings 
with the Greek world the saying holds, " You had 
power to draw but not to keep me " ; if we recol- 
lect, further, that it was in the second century that 
the foundations of the whole of the ecclesiastical 
system prevailing up to the present day were laid, 
we can only be astonished at the greatness of the 
work which was then achieved. 

We now return to the two questions which we 
raised : How was this great transformation accom- 
plished? and, Did the Gospel hold its own amid this 
change, or, if so, how ? 

There were, if I am not mistaken, three leading 
forces engaged in bringing about this great revolu- 
tion, and effecting the organisation of new forms. 
The first of these forces tallies with the universal 
law in the history of religion, for in every religious 



2 1 2 What is Christianity ? 

development we find it at work. When the second 
and third generations after the founding of a new re- 
ligion have passed away ; when hundreds, nay, thou- 
sands, have become its adherents, no longer through 
conversion but by the influences of tradition and 
of birth, despite Tertullian's saying : fiunt, non nas- 
cuntur Christiani ; when those who have laid hold 
upon the faith as great spoil are joined by crowds 
of others who wrap it round them like an outer gar- 
ment, a revolution always occurs. The religion of 
strong feeling and of the heart passes into the re- 
ligion of custom and therefore of form and of law. 
A new religion may be instituted with the greatest 
vigour, the utmost enthusiasm, and a tremendous 
amount of inner emotion ; it may at the same time 
lay ever so much stress on spiritual freedom — where 
was all this ever more powerfully expressed than in 
Paul's teaching ? — and yet, even though believers 
be forced to be celibates and only adults be received, 
the process of solidifying and codifying the religion 
is bound to follow. Its forms then at once stiffen ; 
in the very process of stiffening they receive for the 
first time a real significance, and new forms are added. 
Not only do they acquire the value of laws and 
regulations, but they come to be insensibly regarded 
as though they contained within them the very sub- 
stance of religion ; nay, as though they were them- 
selves that substance. This is the way in which 



Catholicism 213 

people who do not feel religion to be a reality are 
compelled to regard it, for otherwise they would 
have nothing at all ; and this is the way in which 
those who continue really to live in it are compelled 
to handle it, or else they would be unable to exer- 
cise any influence upon others. The former are not 
by any means necessarily hypocrites. Real religion, 
of course, is a closed book to them ; its most im- 
portant element has evaporated. But there are 
various points of view from which a man may still 
be able to appreciate religion without living in it. 
He may appreciate it as discharging the functions 
of morality, or of police ; above all he may appreci- 
ate it on aesthetic grounds. When the Romanticists 
re-introduced Catholicism into Germany and France 
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Chateau- 
briand, more especially, was never tired of sing- 
ing its praises and fancied that he had all the 
feelings of a Catholic. But an acute critic remarked 
that Monsieur Chateaubriand was mistaken in his 
feelings; he thought that he was a true Catholic, 
while as a matter of fact he was only standing be- 
fore the ancient ruin of the Church and exclaiming: 
l< How beautiful!" That is one of the ways in 
which a man can appreciate a religion without be- 
ing an inward adherent of it ; but there are many 
others, and, amongst them, some in which a nearer 
approach is made to its true substance. All of 



214 What is Christianity? 

them, however, have this much in common, that any 
actual experience of religion is no longer felt, or felt 
only in an uncertain and intermittent way. Con- 
versely, a high regard is paid to the outward shows 
and influences connected with it, and they are care- 
fully maintained. Whatever finds expression in 
doctrines, regulations, ordinances, and forms of pub- 
lic worship comes to be treated as the thing itself. 
This, then, is the first force at work in the trans- 
formation : the original enthusiasm , in the large sense 
of the word, evaporates, and the religion of law and 
form at once arises. 

But not only did an original element evaporate in 
the course of the second century : another was in- 
troduced. Even had this youthful religion not sev- 
ered the tie which bound it to Judaism, it would 
have been inevitably affected by the spirit and the 
civilisation of that Graeco-Roman world on whose 
soil it was permanently settled. But to how much 
greater an extent was it exposed to the influence 
of this spirit after being sharply severed from the 
Jewish religion and the Jewish nation. It hovered 
bodiless over the earth like a being of the air ; bodi- 
less and seeking a body. The spirit, no doubt, 
makes to itself its own body, but it does so by as- 
similating what is around it. The influx of Hel- 
lenism, of the Greek spirit, and the union of the 
Gospel with it, form the greatest fact in the history 



Greek Philosophy 215 

of the Church in the second century, and when the 
fact was once established as a foundation it contin- 
ued through the following centuries. In the influ- 
ence of Hellenism on the Christian religion three 
stages may be distinguished, and a preliminary 
stage as well. We have already mentioned the 
preliminary stage in a previous lecture. It is to be 
found in the circumstances in which the Gospel 
arose, and it formed a very condition of its appear- 
ance. Not until Alexander the Great had created 
an entirely new position of affairs, and the barriers 
separating the nations of the East from one another 
and from Hellenism had been destroyed, could 
Judaism free itself from its limitations and start 
upon its development into a religion for the world. 
The time was ripe when a man in the East could 
also breathe the air of Greece and see his spiritual 
horizon stretch beyond the limits of his own nation. 
Yet we cannot say that the earliest Christian writ- 
ings, let alone the Gospel, show, to any considera- 
ble extent, the presence of a Greek element. If we 
are to look for it anywhere — apart from certain well- 
marked traces of it in Paul, Luke, and John — it 
must be in the possibility of the new religion appear- 
ing at all. We cannot enter further upon this 
question here. The first stage of any real influx of 
definitely Greek thought and Greek life is to be 
fixed at about the year 130. It was then that the 



216 What is Christianity ? 

religious philosophy of Greece began to effect an 
entrance, and it went straight to the centre of the 
new religion. It sought to get into inner touch 
with Christianity, and, conversely, Christianity 
itself held out a hand to this ally. We are speak- 
ing of Greek philosophy ; as yet, there is no trace of 
mythology, Greek worship, and so on ; all that was 
taken up into the Church, cautiously and under 
proper guarantees, was the great capital which philo- 
sophy had amassed since the days of Socrates. A 
century or so later, about the year 220 or 230, the 
second stage begins: Greek mysteries, and Greek 
civilisation in the whole range of its development, 
exercise their influence on the Church, but not 
mythology and polytheism ; these were still to 
come. Another century, however, had in its turn 
to elapse before Hellenism as a whole and in every 
phase of its development was established in the 
Church. Guarantees, of course, are not lacking 
here either, but for the most part they consist only 
in a change of label ; the thing itself is taken over 
without alteration, and in the worship of the saints 
we see a regular Christian religion of a lower order 
arising. We are here concerned, however, not with 
the second and third stages, but only with that in- 
flux of the Greek spirit which was marked by the 
absorption of Greek philosophy and, particularly, 
of Platonism. Who can deny that elements here 



The Logos 217 

came together which stood in elective affinity ? So 
much depth and delicacy of feeling, so much earn- 
estness and dignity, and — above all — so strong a 
monotheistic piety were displayed in the religious 
ethics of the Greeks, acquired as it had been by 
hard toil on a basis of inner experience and meta- 
physical speculation, that the Christian religion 
could not pass this treasure by with indifference. 
There was much in it, indeed, which was defective 
and repellent ; there was no personality visibly em- 
bodying its ethics as a living power ; it still kept up 
a strange connexion with "demon-worship" and 
polytheism ; but both as a whole and in its individ- 
ual parts it was felt to contain a kindred element, 
and it was absorbed. 

But besides the Greek ethics there was also a cos- 
mological conception which the Church took over at 
this time, and which was destined in a few decades 
to attain a commanding position in its doctrinal 
system — the Logos. Starting from an examination 
of the world and the life within, Greek thought had 
arrived at the conception of an active central idea — 
by what stages we need not here mention. This 
central idea represented the unity of the supreme 
principle of the world, of thought, and of ethics; 
but it also represented, at the same time, the divin- 
ity itself as a creative and active, as distinguished 
from a quiescent, power. The most important step 



218 What is Christianity? 

that was ever taken in the domain of Christian doc- 
trine was when the Christian apologists at the be- 
ginning of the second century drew the equation: 
the Logos = Jesus Christ. Ancient teachers before 
them had also called Christ " the Logos" among 
the many predicates which they ascribed to him ; 
nay, one of them, John, had already formulated the 
proposition: " The Logos is Jesus Christ." But 
with John this proposition had not become the basis 
of every speculative idea about Christ; with him, 
too, " the Logos " was only a predicate. But now 
teachers came forward who previous to their con- 
version had been adherents of the platonico-stoical 
philosophy, and with whom the conception 
" Logos" formed an inalienable part of a general 
philosophy of the world. They proclaimed that 
Jesus Christ was the Logos incarnate, which had 
hitherto been revealed only in the great effects 
which it exercised. In the place of the entirely un- 
intelligible conception " Messiah," an intelligible 
one was acquired at a stroke; Christology, totter- 
ing under the exuberance of its own affirmations, 
received a stable basis; Christ's significance for the 
world was established ; his mysterious relation to 
God was explained ; the cosmos, reason, and ethics 
were comprehended as one. It was, indeed, a mar- 
vellous formula; and was not the way prepared for 
it, nay, hastened, by the speculative ideas about the 



The Logos 219 

Messiah propounded by Paul and other ancient 
teachers? The knowledge that the divine in Christ 
must be conceived as the Logos opened up a num- 
ber of problems, and at the same time set them 
definite limits and gave them definite directives. 
Christ's unique character as opposed to all rivals 
appeared to be established in the simplest fashion, 
and yet the conception provided thought with so 
much liberty and free play that Christ could be re- 
garded, as the need might arise, on the one side as 
operative deity itself, and on the other as still the 
first-born among many brethren and as the first 
created of God. 

What a proof it is of the impression which 
Christ's teaching created that Greek philosophers 
managed to identify him with the Logos! For the 
assertion that the incarnation of the Logos had 
taken place in an historical personage there had been 
no preparation. No philosophising Jew had ever 
thought of identifying the Messiah with the Logos; 
no Philo, for instance, ever entertained the idea of 
such an equation ! It gave a metaphysical signific- 
ance to an historical fact ; it drew into the domain 
of cosmology and religious philosophy a person who 
had appeared in time and space ; but by so distin- 
guishing one person it raised all history to the plane 
of the cosmical movement. 

The identification of the Logos with Christ was 



220 What is Christianity? 

the determining factor in the fusion of Greek philo- 
sophy with the apostolic inheritance and led the 
more thoughtful Greeks to adopt the latter. Most 
of us regard this identification as inadmissible, be- 
cause the way in which we conceive the world and 
ethics does not point to the existence of any Logos 
at all. But a man must be blind not to see that for 
that age the appropriate formula for uniting the 
Christian religion with Greek thought was the 
Logos. Nor is it difficult even to-day to attach a 
valid meaning to the conception. An unmixed 
blessing it has not been. To a much larger extent 
than the earlier speculative ideas about Christ it 
absorbed men's interest; it withdrew their minds 
from the simplicity of the Gospel, and increasingly 
transformed it into a philosophy of religion. The 
proposition that the Logos had appeared among 
men had an intoxicating effect, but the enthusiasm 
and transport which it produced in the soul did not 
lead with any certainty to the God whom Jesus 
Christ proclaimed. 

The loss of an original element and the gain of a 
fresh one, namely, the Greek, are insufficient to ex- 
plain the great change which the Christian religion 
experienced in the second century. We must bear 
in mind, thirdly, the great struggle which that re- 
ligion was then carrying on within its own domain. 
Parallel with the slow influx of the element of 



Catholicism 221 

Greek philosophy, experiments were being made all 
along the line in the direction of what may be 
briefly called " acute Hellenisation." While they 
offer us a most magnificent historical spectacle, in 
the period itself they were a terrible danger. More 
than any before it, the second century is the 
century of religious fusion, of " Theocrasia." The 
problem was to include Christianity in this religious 
fusion, as one element among others, although the 
chief. The " Hellenism " which made this endeav- 
our had already attracted to itself all the mysteries, 
all the philosophy of Eastern worship, elements the 
most sublime and the most absurd, and by the 
never-failing aid of philosophical, that is to say, of 
allegorical interpretation, had spun them all into a 
glittering web. It now fell upon — I cannot help so 
expressing it — the Christian religion. It was im- 
pressed by the sublime character of this religion ; it 
did reverence to Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the 
world ; it offered to give up everything that it pos- 
sessed — all the treasures of its civilisation and its 
wisdom — to this message, if only the message would 
suffer them to stand. As though endowed with the 
right to rule, the message was to make its entry 
into a ready-made theory of the world and religion, 
and into mysteries already prepared for it. What a 
proof of the impression which this message made, 
and what a temptation ! This " Gnosticism," — such 



222 What is Christianity ? 

is the name which the movement has received, — 
strong and active in the plenitude of its religious 
experiments, established itself under Christ's name, 
developed a vigorous and abiding feeling for many- 
Christian ideas, sought to give shape to what was 
still shapeless, to settle accounts with what was ex- 
ternally incomplete, and to bring the whole stream 
of the Christian movement into its own channel. 
The majority of the faithful, led by their bishops, 
so far from yielding to these enticements, took up 
the struggle with them in the conviction that they 
masked a demonic temptation. But struggle in 
this case meant definition, that is to say, drawing a 
sharp line of demarcation around what was Christ- 
ian and declaring everything heathen that would 
not keep within it. The struggle with Gnosticism 
compelled the Church to put its teaching, its worship y 
and its discipline into fixed forms and ordinances, 
and to exclude everyone who would not yield them 
obedience. In the conviction that it was everywhere 
only conserving and honouring what had been 
handed down, it never for a moment doubted that 
the obedience which it demanded was anything 
more than subjection to the divine will itself, and 
that in the doctrines with which it encountered the 
enemy it was exhibiting the impress of religion itself. 
If by " Catholic" we mean the church of doc- 
trine and of law, then the Catholic Church had its 



Catholicism 223 

origin in the struggle with Gnosticism. It had to 
pay a heavy price for the victory which kept that 
tendency at bay ; we may almost say that the van- 
quished imposed their terms upon the victor : Victi 
victoribus legem dederunt. It kept Dualism and the 
acute phase of Hellenism at bay ; but by becoming a 
community with a fully worked-out scheme of doc- 
trine, and a definite form of public worship, it was 
of necessity compelled to take on forms analogous 
to those which it combated in the Gnostics. To 
encounter our enemy's theses by setting up others 
one by one is to change over to his ground. How 
much of its original freedom the Church sacrificed ! 
It was now forced to say: You are no Christian, 
you cannot come into any relation with God at all, 
unless you have first of all acknowledged these doc- 
trines, yielded obedience to these ordinances, and 
followed out definite forms of mediation. Nor was 
anyone to think a religious experience legitimate 
that had not been sanctioned by sound doctrine and 
approved by the priests. The Church found no 
other way and no other means of maintaining itself 
against Gnosticism, and what was set up as a pro- 
tection against enemies from without became the 
palladium, nay, the very foundation, within. This 
entire development, it is true, would probably have 
taken place apart from the struggle in question, — 
the two elements which we first discussed would 



224 What is Christianity? 

have produced it ; but that it took place so rapidly 
and assumed so positive, nay, so Draconian, a 
shape, was due to the fact that the struggle was 
one in which the very existence of the traditional 
religion was at stake. The superficial view that the 
personal ambition of certain individuals was at the 
bottom of the whole system of established ordin- 
ance and priesthood is absolutely untenable. The 
loss of the original, living element is by itself suffi- 
cient to explain the phenomena. La mtdiocrite 
fonde V autorite. It is the man who knows religion 
only as usage and obedience that creates the priest, 
for the purpose of ridding himself of an essential 
part of the obligations which he feels by loading him 
with them. He also makes ordinances, for the 
semi-religious prefer an ordinance to a Gospel. 

We have endeavoured to indicate the tendencies 
by which the great change was effected. It re- 
mains to answer the second question : Did the 
Gospel hold its own amid the change, and, if so, 
how ? That it entered upon an entirely new set of 
circumstances is already obvious; but we shall have 
to study them more closely. 



LECTURE XII 

NO one can compare the internal state of Christ- 
endom at the beginning of the third century 
with the state in which it found itself a hundred and 
twenty years earlier without being moved by con- 
flicting views and sentiments. Admiration for the 
vigorous achievement presented in the creation of 
the Catholic Church, and for the energy with which 
it extended its activity in all directions, is balanced 
by concern at the absence of those many elements 
of freedom and directness, united, however, by an 
inward bond, which the primitive age possessed. 
Although we are compelled gratefully to acknow- 
ledge that this Church repelled all attempts to let 
the Christian religion simply dissolve into contem- 
porary thought, and protected itself against the acute 
phase of Hellenisation, still we cannot shut our eyes 
to the fact that it had to pay a high price for main- 
taining its position. Let us determine a little more 
precisely what the alteration was which was effected 
in it, and on which we have already touched. 

The first and most prominent change is the way 

in which freedom and independence in matters of 

15 

225 



226 What is Christianity? 

religion are endangered. No one is to feel and count 
himself a Christian, that is to say, a child of God, 
who has not previously subjected his religious 
knowledge and experience to the controlling influ- 
ence of the Church's creed. The " Spirit " is con- 
fined within the narrowest limits, and forbidden to 
work where and as it will. Nay, more ; not only is 
the individual, except in special cases, to begin by 
being a minor and by obeying the Church ; he is 
never to become of full age, that is to say, he is 
never to lose his dependence on doctrine, on the 
priest, on public worship, and on the " book." It 
was then that what we still specifically call the 
Catholic form of godliness, in contrast with Evan- 
gelicalism, originated. A blow was dealt to the di- 
rect and immediate element in religion; and for 
any individual to restore it afresh for himself be- 
came a matter of extraordinary difficulty. 

Secondly, although the acute phase of Hellenisa- 
tion was avoided, Christendom became more and 
more penetrated by the Greek and philosophical 
idea that true religion is first and foremost " doc- 
trine," and doctrine, too, that is coextensive with 
the whole range of knowledge. That this faith of 
"slaves and old women" attracted to itself the 
entire philosophy of God and the world which the 
Greeks had formed, and undertook to recast that 
philosophy as though teaching it were part of its 



Catholicism 227 

own substance and unite it with the teaching of 
Jesus Christ, was certainly a proof of the inner 
power of the Christian religion ; but the process in- 
volved, as a necessary consequence, a displacement 
of the fundamental religious interest, and the ad- 
dition of an enormous burden. The question, 
1 What must I do to be saved ? " which in Jesus 
Christ's and the apostles' day could still receive a 
very brief answer, now evoked a most diffuse one ; 
and even though in view of the laymen shorter re- 
plies might still be provided, the laymen were in so 
far regarded as imperfect, and expected to observe 
a submissive attitude towards the learned. The 
Christian religion had already received that tend- 
ency to Intellectualism which has clung to it ever 
since. But when thus presented as a huge and com- 
plex fabric, as a vast and difficult system of doc- 
trine, not only is it encumbered, but its earnest 
character threatens to disappear. This character 
depends upon the emotional and gladdening ele- 
ment in it being kept directly accessible. The Christ- 
ian religion is assuredly informed with the desire 
to come to terms with all knowledge and with in- 
tellectual life as a whole ; but when achievements in 
this field — even presuming that they always accord 
with truth and reality — are held to be equally bind- 
ing with the evangelical message, or even to be a 
necessary preliminary to it, mischief is done to 



228 What is Christianity ? 

the cause of religion. This mischief is already un- 
mistakably present at the beginning of the third 
century. 

Thirdly, the Church obtained a special, independ- 
ent value as an institution ; it became a religious 
power. Originally only a developed form of that 
community of brothers which furnished place and 
manner for God's common worship and a mysteri- 
ous shadow of the heavenly Church, it now became, 
as an institution , an indispensable factor in religion. 
People were taught that in this institution Christ's 
Spirit had deposited everything that the individual 
man can need; that he is wholly bound to it, there- 
fore, not only in love but also in faith ; that it is 
there only that the Spirit works, and therefore there 
only that all its gifts of grace are to be found. 
That the individual Christian who did not sub- 
ordinate himself to the ecclesiastical institution re- 
lapsed, as a rule, into heathenism, and fell into false 
and evil doctrines or an immoral life, was, indeed, 
an actual fact. The effect of this, combined with 
the struggle against the Gnostics, was that the in- 
stitution, together with all its forms and arrange- 
ments, became more and more identified with the 
' ' bride of Christ, " ' ' the true Jerusalem, " and so on, 
and accordingly was even itself proclaimed as the 
inviolable creation of God, and the fixed and un- 
alterable abode of the Holy Ghost. Consistently 



Catholicism 229 

with this, it began to announce that all its ordin- 
ances were equally sacred. How greatly religious 
liberty was thus encumbered I need not show. 

Fourthly and lastly, the Gospel was not pro- 
claimed as the glad message with the same vigour 
in the second century as it had been in the first. 
The reasons for this are manifold : on the one hand 
personal experience of religion was not felt so 
strongly as Paul, or as the author of the fourth 
Gospel, felt it ; on the other, the prevalent eschato- 
logical expectations, which those teachers had re- 
strained by their more profound teaching, remained 
in full sway. Fear and hope are more prominent in 
the Christianity of the second century than they are 
with Paul, and it is only in appearance that the 
former stands near to Jesus' sayings; for, as we 
saw, God's Fatherhood is the main article in Jesus' 
message. But, as Romans viii. proves, the know- 
ledge of this truth is just what Paul embodied in his 
preaching of the faith. While the element of fear 
thus obtained a larger scope in the Christianity of 
the second century, — this scope increased in propor- 
tion as the original buoyancy died down and con- 
formity to the world extended, — the ethical element 
became less free and more a matter of law and 
rigorism. In religion, rigorism always forms the 
obverse side of secularity. But as it appeared im- 
possible to expect a rigoristic ethics of everyone, 



230 What is Christianity ? 

the distinction between a perfect and a sufficient 
morality already set in as an element in the growth 
of Catholicism. That the roots of this distinction 
go further back is a fact of which we need not here 
take account ; it was only towards the end of the 
second century that the distinction became a fatal 
one. Born of necessity and erected into a virtue, 
it soon grew so important that the existence of 
Christianity as a Catholic Church came to depend 
upon it. The uniformity of the Christian ideal was 
thereby disturbed and a quantitative view of moral 
achievement suggested which is unknown to the 
Gospel. The Gospel does, no doubt, make a dis- 
tinction between a strong and a weak faith, and 
greater and smaller moral achievements; but he 
that is least in the kingdom of God may be perfect 
in his kind. 

These various tendencies together denote the 
essential changes which the Christian religion ex- 
perienced up to the beginning of the third century, 
and by which it was modified. Did the Gospel 
hold its own in spite of them, and how may that be 
shown ? Well, we can cite a whole series of docu- 
ments, which, so far as written words can attest 
inner and genuinely Christian life, bear very clear 
and impressive testimony that such life existed. 
Martyrdoms like those of Perpetua and Felicitas, 
or letters passing between communities, like those 



Catholicism 231 

from Lyons to Asia Minor, exhibit the Christian 
faith and the strength and delicacy of moral sentim- 
ent with a splendour only paralleled in the days 
when the faith was founded ; while of all that had 
been done in the external development of the Church 
they make no mention whatever. The way to God 
is found with certainty, and the simplicity of the 
life within does not appear to be disturbed or en- 
cumbered. Again, let us take a writer like the 
Christian religious philosopher, Clement of Alex- 
andria, who flourished about the year 200. We can 
still feel from his writings that this scholar, although 
he was absolutely steeped in speculative ideas, and 
as a thinker reduced the Christian religion to a 
boundless sea of " doctrines," — a Greek in every 
fibre of his being, — won peace and joy from the 
Gospel, and he can also express what he won and 
testify of the power of the living God. It is as a 
new man that he appears, one who has pressed on 
through the whole range of philosophy, through 
authority and speculation, through all the externals 
of religion, to the glorious liberty of the children of 
God. His faith in Providence, his faith in Christ, 
his doctrine of freedom, his ethics — everything is 
expressed in language that betrays the Greek, and 
yet everything is new and genuinely Christian. 
Further, if we compare him with a Christian of 
quite another stamp, namely, his contemporary, 



232 What is Christianity ? 

Tertullian, it is easy to show that what they have in 
common in religion is what they have learned from 
the Gospel, nay, is the Gospel itself. And in read- 
ing Tertullian's exposition of the Lord's Prayer, 
and turning it over in our minds, we see that this 
hot-blooded African, this stern foe of heretics, this 
resolute champion of auctoritas and ratio, this dog- 
matic advocate, this man at once Churchman and 
enthusiast, nevertheless possessed a deep feeling for 
the main substance of the Gospel and a good 
knowledge of it as well. In this Old-Catholic 
Church the Gospel, truly, was not as yet stifled! 

Further, this Church still kept up the all-import- 
ant idea that the Christian community must present 
itself as a society of brothers active in work, and it 
gave expression to this idea in a way that puts sub- 
sequent generations to shame. 

Lastly, there can be no doubt — and while so truth- 
loving a man as Origen confirms the fact for us, 
heathen writers like Lucian also attest it — that the 
hope of an eternal life, the full confidence in Christ, 
a readiness to make sacrifices, and a purity of morals 
were still, in spite of all frailties — here, too, not lack- 
ing, — the real characteristics of this society. Origen 
can challenge his heathen opponents to compare 
any community whatever with the Christian com- 
munity, and to say where the greater moral excel- 
lence lies. This religion had, no doubt, already 



Greek Catholicism 233 

developed a husk and integument; to penetrate 
through to it and grasp the kernel had become more 
difficult ; it had also lost much of its original life. 
But the gifts and the tasks which the Gospel offered 
still remained in force, and the fabric which the 
Church had erected around them also served many 
a man as the means by which he attained to the 
thing itself. 

We now pass to the consideration of 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN GREEK CATHOLICISM 

I must invite you to descend several centuries 
with me and to look at the Greek Church as it is to- 
day, and as it has been preserved, essentially unal- 
tered, for more than a thousand years. Between the 
third and the nineteenth century the history of the 
Church of the East nowhere presents any deep gulf. 
Hence we may take up our position in the present. 
Here, in turn, we ask the three following questions: 

What did this Greek Catholicism achieve ? 

What are its characteristics ? 

What modifications did the Gospel here undergo, 
and how did it hold its own ? 

What did this Greek Catholicism achieve ? Two 
facts may be cited on this point : firstly, in the great 
domain which it embraces, the countries of the east- 
ern part of the Mediterranean and northwards to the 
Arctic Ocean, it made an end of heathenism and 



234 What is Christianity ? 

polytheism. The decisive victory was accomplished 
from the third to the sixth century, and so effect- 
ually accomplished that the gods of Greece really 
perished — perished unwept and unmourned. Not 
in any great battle did they die, but from sheer ex- 
haustion, and without offering any resistance worth 
mention. I may just point out that before dying 
they transferred a considerable portion of their 
power to the Church's saints. But, what is more 
important, with the death of the gods Neoplaton- 
ism, the last great product of Greek philosophy, was 
also vanquished. The religious philosophy of the 
Church proved the stronger. The victory over Hel- 
lenism is an achievement of the Eastern Church on 
which it still subsists. Secondly, this Church man- 
aged to effect such a fusion with the individual na- 
tions which it drew into its bosom that religion and 
church became to them national palladia, na3^, pal- 
ladia pure and simple. Go amongst Greeks, Rus- 
sians, Armenians, etc., and you will everywhere find 
that religion and nationality are inseparable, and 
the one element exists only in and alongside of the 
other. Men of these nationalities will, if need be, 
suffer themselves to be cut in pieces for their religion. 
This is no mere consequence of the pressure exer- 
cised by the hostile power of Mohammedanism ; the 
Russians are not subject to this pressure. Nor is it 
only — shall I say ? — in the Moscow press that we 



Greek Catholicism 235 

can see what a firm and intimate connexion exists 
between Church and nation in these peoples, in 
spite of " sects," which are not wanting here either; 
to convince ourselves of it we must read — to take 
an instance at random — Tolstoi's Village Tales. 
They bring before the reader a really touching pic- 
ture of the deep influence of the Church, with its 
message of the Eternal, of self-sacrifice, of sym- 
pathy and fraternity, on the national mind. That 
the clergy stand low in the social scale, and fre- 
quently encounter contempt, must not delude us 
into supposing that as the representatives of the 
Church they do not occupy an incomparably high 
station. In Eastern Europe the monastic ideal is 
deeply rooted in the national soul. 

But the mention of these two points includes 
everything that can be said about the achievements 
of this Church. To add that it has disseminated a 
certain amount of culture would involve pitching 
our standard of culture very low. In comparison 
with Islam, too, it is no longer so successful in do- 
ing what it has done in the past and still does in re- 
gard to polytheism. The missions of the Russian 
Church are still overthrowing polytheism even to- 
day; but large territories have been lost to Islam, 
and the Church has not recovered them. Islam has 
extended its victories as far as the Adriatic and in 
the direction of Bosnia. It has won over numerous 



236 What is Christianity ? 

Albanian and Slav tribes which were once Christian. 
It shows itself to be at least a match for the Church, 
although we must not forget that in the heart of its 
dominions there are Christian nations who have 
maintained their creed. 

Our second question was, What are the character- 
istics of this Church ? The answer is not easy ; for 
as it presents itself to the spectator this Church is a 
highly complex structure. The feelings, the super- 
stitions, the learning, and the devotional philosophy 
of hundreds, nay, of thousands of years, are built 
into it. But, further; no one can look at this 
Church from outside, with its forms of worship, its 
solemn ritual, the number of its ceremonies, its 
relics, pictures, priests, monks, and the philosophy 
of its mysteries, and then compare it on the one 
hand with the Church of the first century, and on 
the other with the Hellenic cults in the age of Neo- 
platonism, without arriving at the conclusion that 
it belongs not to the former but to the latter. /*/ 
takes the form, not of a Christian product in Greek 
dress, but of a Greek product in Christian dress. It 
would have done battle with the Christians of the 
first century just as it did battle with the worship 
of Magna Mater and Zeus Soter. There are innum- 
erable features of this Church which are counted as 
sacred as the Gospel, and towards which not even 
a tendency existed in primitive Christianity. Of the 



Greek Catholicism 237 

whole performance of the chief religious service, 
nay, even of many of the dogmas, the same thing 
may, in the last resort, be said : if certain words, 
like " Christ," etc., are omitted, there is nothing left 
to recall the original element. In its external form 
as a whole this Church is nothing more than a con- 
tinuation of the history of Greek religion under the 
alien influence of Christianity, parallel to the many 
other alien influences which have affected it. We 
might also describe it as the natural product of the 
union between Hellenism, itself already in a state of 
oriental decay, and Christian teaching; it is the 
transformation which history effects in a religion by 
" natural" means, and, as was here the case, was 
bound to effect between the third and the sixth 
century. In this sense it is a natural religion. The 
conception admits of a double meaning. It is gen- 
erally understood as an abstract term covering all 
the elementary feelings and processes traceable in 
every religion. Whether there are any such ele- 
ments, or, on the Other hand, whether they are 
sufficiently stable and articulate to be followed as a 
whole, admits, however, of a doubt. The concep- 
tion " natural religion" may be better applied to 
the growth which a religion produces when the 
" natural " forces of history have ceased playing on 
it. At bottom these forces are everywhere the 
same, although differing in the way in which they 



238 What is Christianity ? 

are mounted. They mould religion until it answers 
their purpose; not by expelling what is sacred, 
venerable, and so on, but by assigning it the place 
and allowing it the scope which they consider right. 
They immerse everything in a uniform medium, — 
that medium which, like the air, is the first condi- 
tion of their " natural" existence. In this sense, 
then, the Greek Church is a natural religion ; no 
prophet, no reformer, no genius, has arisen in its 
history since the third century to disturb the ordin- 
ary process by which a religion becomes naturalised 
into common history. The process attained its 
completion in the sixth century and asserted itself 
victoriously against severe assaults in the eighth and 
ninth. The Church has since been at rest, and no 
further essential, nay, not even any unessential, 
change has taken place in the condition which it 
then reached. Since then, apparently, the nations 
belonging to this Church have undergone nothing to 
make it seem intolerable to them and to call for any 
reform in it. They still continue, then, in this 
" natural " religion of the sixth century. 

I have, however, advisedly spoken of the Church 
in its external form. Its complex character is partly 
due to the fact that we cannot arrive at its inner 
condition by simple deduction from its outer. It is 
not sufficient to observe, although the observation 
is correct, that this Church is part of the history of 



Greek Catholicism 239 

Greek religion. It exercises influences which from 
this point of view are not easily intelligible. We 
cannot form a correct estimate of it unless we 
dwell more closely on the factors which lend it its 
character. 

The first factor which we encounter is tradition, 
and the observance of it. The sacred and the di- 
vine do not exist in free action, — we shall see later 
to what reservations this statement is subject, — but 
are put, as it were, into a storehouse, in the form of 
an immense capital. The capital is to provide for 
all demands, and to be coined in the precise way in 
which the Fathers coined it. Here, it is true, we 
have an idea which can be traced to something al- 
ready existing in the primitive age. We read in the 
Acts of the Apostles that" they continued stead- 
fastly in the apostles' doctrine." But what became 
of this practice and this obligation ? Firstly, every- 
thing was designated " apostolic " which was de- 
posited in this Church in the course of the 
succeeding centuries ; or, rather, what the Church 
considered necessary to possess in order to suit the 
historical position in which it was placed it called 
apostolic, because it fancied that otherwise it could 
not exist, and what is necessary for the Church's ex- 
istence must be simply apostolic. Secondly, it has 
been established as an irrefragable fact that the 
" continuing steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine " 



240 What is Christianity ? 

applies, first and foremost, to the punctilious observ- 
ance of every direction as to ritual : the sacred ele- 
ment is bound up with text and form. Both are 
conceived in a thoroughly antique way. That the 
divine is, so to speak, stored up as though it were 
an actual commodity, and that the supreme demand 
which the Deity makes is the punctilious observance 
of a ritual, were ideas that in antiquity were per- 
fectly familiar and admitted of no doubt. Tradi- 
tion and ceremony are the conditions under which 
the Holy alone existed and was accessible. Obedi- 
ence, respect, reverence, were the most important 
religious feelings. Whilst they are doubtless in- 
alienable features of religion, it is only as accom- 
paniments of an active feeling quite different in its 
character that they possess any value, and that 
further presumes that the object to which they are 
directed is a worthy one. Traditionalism and the 
ritualism so closely connected with it are prominent 
characteristics of the Greek Church, but this is just 
what shows how far it has departed from the Gospel. 
The second point that fixes the character of this 
Church is the value which it attaches to orthodoxy, 
to sound doctrine. It has stated and re-stated its 
doctrines with the greatest precision and often 
enough made them a terror to men of different 
creed. No one, it claims, can be saved who does 
not possess the correct doctrine ; the man who does 



Greek Catholicism 241 

not possess it is to be expelled and must forfeit all 
his rights; if he be a fellow-countryman, he must be 
treated as a leper and lose all connexion with his 
nation. This fanaticism, which still flares up here 
and there in the Greek Church even to-day, and in 
principle has not been abandoned, is not Greek, al- 
though a certain inclination towards it was not lack- 
ing in the ancient Greeks ; still less did it originate 
in Roman law; it is the result, rather, of an unfor- 
tunate combination of several factors. When the 
Roman Empire became Christian, the hard fight for 
existence which the Church had waged with the 
Gnostics was not yet forgotten ; still less had the 
Church forgotten the last bloody persecutions which 
the State had inflicted upon it in a kind of despair. 
These two circumstances would in themselves be 
sufficient to explain how the Church came to feel 
that it had a right of reprisal, and was at the same 
time bound to suppress heretics. But, in addition, 
there had now appeared in the highest place, since 
the days of Diocletian and Constantine, the absolut- 
ist conception, derived from the East, of the un- 
limited right and the unlimited duty of the ruler in 
regard to his "subjects." The unfortunate factor 
in the great change was that the Roman Emperor 
was at once, and almost in the same moment, a 
Christian emperor and an Oriental despot. The 

more conscientious he was, the more intolerant he 

16 



242 What is Christianity ? 

was bound to be ; for the Deity had committed to 
his care not only men's bodies but their souls as 
well. Thus arose the aggressive and all-devouring 
orthodoxy of State and Church, or, rather, of the 
State-Church. Examples which were to hand from 
the Old Testament completed and sanctified the 
process. 

Intolerance is a new growth in the land of the 
Greeks and cannot be roundly laid to their charge ; 
but the way in which doctrine developed, namely, 
as a philosophy of God and the world, was due to 
their influence ; and the fact that religion and doc- 
trine were directly identified is also a product of the 
Greek spirit. No mere reference to the significance 
which doctrine already possessed in the apostolic 
age, and to the tendencies operating in the direc- 
tion of bringing it into a speculative form, is suf- 
ficient to explain the change. These are matters, as 
I hope that I have shown in the previous lectures, 
which are rather to be understood in a different 
sense. It is in the second century, and with the 
apologists, that Intellectualism commences; and, 
supported by the struggle with the Gnostics and by 
the Alexandrian school of religious philosophers in 
the Church, it manages to prevail. 

But it is not enough to assess the teaching of the 
Greek Church by its formal side alone, and ascertain 
in what way and to what extent it is exhibited, and 



Greek Catholicism 243 

what is the value to be placed upon it. We must 
also examine its substance ; for it possesses two ele- 
ments which are quite peculiar to it and separate it 
from the Greek philosophy of religion — the idea of 
the creation, and the doctrine of the God-Man nature 
of the Saviour. We shall treat of these two ele- 
ments in our next lecture, and, further, of the two 
other elements which, side by side with tradition 
and doctrine, characterise the Greek Church, 
namely, the form of worship and the order of monk- 
hood. 



LECTURE XIII 

SO far we have established the fact that Greek 
Catholicism is characterised as a religion by 
two elements : by traditionalism and by intellectual- 
ism. According to traditionalism, the reverent 
preservation of the received inheritance, and the 
defence of it against all innovation, is not only an 
important duty, but is itself the practical proof of 
religion. That is an idea quite in harmony with 
antiquity and foreign to the Gospel ; for the Gospel 
knows absolutely nothing of intercourse with God 
being bound up with reverence for tradition itself. 
But the second element, intellectualism, is also of 
Greek origin. The elaboration of the Gospel into a 
vast philosophy of God and the world, in which 
every conceivable kind of material is handled ; the 
conviction that because Christianity is the absolute 
religion it must give information on all questions of 
metaphysics, cosmology, and history; the view of 
revelation as a countless multitude of doctrines and 
explanations, all equally holy and important — this 
is Greek intellectualism. According to it, Know- 
ledge is the highest good, and spirit is spirit only in 

244 



Greek Catholicism 245 

so far as it knows ; everything that is of an aesthetical, 
ethical, and religious character must be converted 
into some form of knowledge, which human will 
and life will then with certainty obey. The devel- 
opment of the Christian faith into an all-embracing 
theosophy, and the identification of faith with theo- 
logical knowledge, are proofs that the Christian re- 
ligion on Greek soil entered the proscribed circle of 
the native religious philosophy and has remained 
there. 

But in this vast philosophy of God and the world, 
which possesses an absolute value as the " substance 
of what has been revealed " and as " orthodox doc- 
trine," there are two elements which radically dis- 
tinguish it from Greek religious philosophy and 
invest it with an. entirely original character. I do 
not mean the appeal which it makes to revelation — 
for to that the Neoplatonists also appealed — but the 
idea of creation and the doctrine of the God-Man 
nature of the Saviour. They traverse the scheme of 
Greek religious philosophy at two critical points, 
and have therefore always been felt to be alien and 
intolerable by its genuine representatives. 

The idea of creation we can deal with in a few 
words. It is undoubtedly an element which is as 
important as it is in thorough keeping with the Gos- 
pel. It abolishes all intertwining of God and world, 
and gives expression to the power and actuality of 



246 What is Christianity ? 

the living God. Attempts were not wanting, it is 
true, among Christian thinkers on Greek soil — just 
because they were Greeks — to conceive the Deity 
only as the uniform power operating in the fabric of 
the world, as the unity in diversity, and as its goal. 
Traces of this speculative idea are even still to be 
found in the Church doctrine ; the idea of creation, 
however, triumphed, and therewith Christianity 
won a real victory. 

The subject of the God-Man nature of the Saviour 
is one on which it is much more difficult to arrive at 
a correct opinion. It is indubitably the central 
point in the whole dogmatic system of the Greek 
Church. It supplied the doctrine of the Trinity. 
In the Greek view these two doctrines together 
make up Christian teaching in nuce. When a 
Father of the Greek Church once said, as he did 
say, " The idea of the God-Man nature, the idea of 
God becoming a man, is what is new in the new, 
nay, is the only new thing under the sun," not only 
did he correctly represent the opinion of all his 
fellow-believers, but he also at the same time strik- 
ingly expressed their view that, while sound intel- 
ligence and earnest reflection yield all the other 
points of doctrine of themselves, this one lies be- 
yond them. The theologians of the Greek Church 
are convinced that the only real distinction between 
the Christian creed and natural philosophy is that 



Greek Catholicism 247 

the former embraces the doctrine of the God-Man 
nature, including the Trinity. Side by side with 
this, the only other doctrine that can at most come 
in question is that of the idea of creation. 

If that be so, it is of radical importance to obtain 
a correct view of the origin, meaning, and value of 
this doctrine. In its completed form it must look 
strange to anyone who comes to it straight from 
the evangelists. While no historical reflection can 
rid us of the impression that the whole fabric 
of ecclesiastical Christology is a thing absolutely 
outside the concrete personality of Jesus Christ, 
historical considerations nevertheless enable us not 
only to explain its origin but also even to justify, 
in a certain degree, the way in which it is formul- 
ated. Let us try to get a clear idea of the leading 
points. 

We saw in a previous lecture how it came about 
that the Church teachers selected the conception of 
the Logos in order to define Christ's nature and 
majesty. They found the conception of the " Mes- 
siah " quite unintelligible; it conveyed no meaning 
to them. As conceptions cannot be improvised, 
they had to choose between representing Christ as 
a deified man, that is to say, as a hero, or conceiv- 
ing his nature after the pattern of one of the Greek 
gods, or identifying it with the Logos. The first 
two possibilities had to be put aside, as they were 



248 What is Christianity ? 

" heathenish/' or seemed to be so. There re- 
mained, therefore, the Logos. How well this form- 
ula served different purposes we have already- 
pointed out. Did it not readily admit of being 
combined with the conception of the Sonship, with- 
out leading to any objectionable theogonies ? It in- 
volved, too, no menace to monotheism. But the 
formula had a logic of its own, and this logic led to 
results which were not absoluely free from suspicion. 
The conception of the Logos was susceptible of 
very varied expression ; in spite of its sublime mean- 
ing, it could be also so conceived as to permit of the 
bearer of the title not being by any means of a truly 
divine nature but possessing one that was only half 
divine. 

The question as to the more exact definition of 
the nature of the Logos-Christ could not have at- 
tained the enormous significance which it received 
in the Church, and might have been stilled by vari- 
ous speculative answers, if it had not been accom- 
panied by the triumph of a very precise idea of the 
nature of redemption, which acted as a peremptory 
challenge. Among all the possible ideas on the 
subject of redemption — forgiveness of sins, release 
from the power of the demons, and so on — that idea 
came victoriously to the front in the Church in the 
third century which conceived of it as redemption 
from death and therewith as elevation to the divine 



Greek Catholicism 249 

life, that is to say, as deification. It is true that this 
conception found a safe starting-point in the Gos- 
pel, and support in the Pauline theology; but in 
the form in which it was now developed it was for- 
eign to both of them and conceived on Greek lines ; 
mortality is in itself reckoned as the greatest evil, 
and as the cause of all evil, while the greatest 
of blessings is to live forever. What a severely 
Greek idea this is we can see, in the first 
place, from the fact that redemption from death 
is presented, in a wholly realistic fashion, as a 
pharmacological process, — the divine nature has to 
flow in and transform the mortal nature, — and, in 
the second, from the way in which eternal life and 
deification were identified. But if actual interfer- 
ence in the constitution of human nature and its 
deification are involved, then the Redeemer must him- 
self be God and must become man. It is only on this 
condition that so marvellous a process can be im- 
agined as actually taking place. Word, doctrine, 
individual deeds, are here of no avail — how can life 
be given to a stone, or a mortal made immortal, by 
preaching at them ? Only when the divine itself 
bodily enters into mortality can mortality be trans- 
formed. It is not, however, the hero, but God 
Himself alone, who possesses the divine, that is to 
say, eternal life, and so possesses it as to permit of 
His giving it to others. The Logos, then, must be 



250 What is Christianity ? 

God Himself, and He must have actually become 
man. With the satisfying of these two conditions, 
real, natural redemption, that is to say, the deifica- 
tion of humanity, is actually effected. These con- 
siderations enable us to understand the prodigious 
disputes over the nature of the Logos-Christ which 
filled several centuries. They explain why Athana- 
sius strove for the formula that the Logos-Christ 
was of the same nature as the Father, as though the 
existence or non-existence of the Christian religion 
were at stake. They show clearly how it was that 
other teachers in the Greek Church regarded any 
menace to the complete unity of the divine and the 
human in the Redeemer, any notion of a merely 
moral connexion, as a death-blow to Christianity. 
These teachers secured their formulas, which for 
them were anything but scholastic conceptions; 
rather, they were the statement and establishment 
of a matter of fact, in the absence of which the 
Christian religion was as unsatisfactory as any other. 
The doctrines of the identical nature of the three 
persons of the Trinity — how the doctrine of the 
Holy Ghost came about I need not mention — and 
of the God-Man nature of the Redeemer are in 
strict accordance with the distinguishing notion of 
the redemption as a deification of man's nature by 
making him immortal. Without the help of the no^ 
tion those formulas would never have been attained ; 



Greek Catholicism 251 

but they also stand and fall with it. They pre- 
vailed, however, not because they were akin to the 
ideas of Greek philosophy, but because they were 
contrasted with them. Greek philosophy never 
ventured, and never aspired, to meet, in any similar 
way by " history " and speculative ideas, that wish 
for immortality which it so vividly entertained. To 
attribute any such interference with the Cosmos to 
an historical personality and the manner in which it 
appeared, and to ascribe to that personality a trans- 
formation in what, given once for all, was in a state 
of eternal flux, must necessarily have seemed, to 
Greek philosophy, pure mythology and superstition. 
The " only new thing under the sun" must neces- 
sarily have appeared to it, and did appear, to be the 
worst kind of fable. 

The Greek Church still entertains the conviction 
to-day that in these doctrines it possesses the es- 
sence of Christianity, regarded at once as a mystery, 
and as a mystery that has been revealed. Criticism 
of this contention is not difficult. We must ac- 
knowledge that those doctrines powerfully con- 
tributed to keeping the Christian religion from 
dissolving into Greek religious philosophy; further, 
that they profoundly impress us with the absolute 
character of this religion ; again, that they are in act- 
ual accordance with the Greek notion of redemp- 
tion; lastly, that this very notion has one of its 



252 What is Christianity? 

roots in the Gospel. But beyond this we can ac- 
knowledge nothing; nay, it is to be observed: (i.) 
that the notion of the redemption as a deification of 
mortal nature is subchristian, because the moral ele- 
ment involved can at best be only tacked on to it ; 
(ii.) that the whole doctrine is inadmissible, because 
it h*s scarcely any connexion with the Jesus Christ 
of the Gospel, and its formulas do not fit him, — it is, 
therefore, not founded in truth; and (iii.) that as it 
is connected with the real Christ only by uncertain 
threads it leads us away from him, — it does not keep 
his image alive, but, on the contrary, demands that 
this image should be apprehended solely in the light 
of alleged hypotheses about him expressed in theo- 
retical propositions. That this substitution pro- 
duces no very serious or destructive effects is 
principally owing to the fact that in spite of them 
the Church has not suppressed the Gospels, and 
that their own innate power makes itself felt. It 
may also be conceded that the notion of God hav- 
ing become man does not everywhere produce the 
effect only of a bewildering mystery, but, on the 
contrary, is capable of leading to the pure and defin- 
ite conviction that God was in Christ. We may 
admit, lastly, that the egoistic desire for immortal 
existence will, within the Christian sphere, experi- 
ence a moral purification through the longing to live 
with and in God, and to remain inseparably bound 



Greek Catholicism 253 

to His love. But all these admissions cannot do 
away with the palpable fact that in Greek dogma 
we have a fatal connexion established between the 
desire of the ancients for immortal life and the 
Christian message. Nor can anyone deny that this 
connexion, implanted in Greek religious philosophy 
and the intellectualism which characterised it, has 
led to formulas which are incorrect, introduce a 
supposititious Christ in the place of the real one, 
and, besides, encourage the delusion that, if only a 
man possesses the right formula, he has the thing 
itself. Even though the Christological formula were 
the theologically right one — what a departure from 
the Gospel is involved in maintaining that a man 
can have no relation with Jesus Christ, nay, that he 
is sinning against him and will be cast out, unless he 
first of all acknowledges that Christ was one person 
with two natures and two powers of will, one of them 
divine and one human. Such is the demand into 
which intellectualism has developed. Can such a sys- 
tem still find a place for the Gospel story of the Sy- 
rophcenician woman or the centurion at Capernaum ? 

But with traditionalism and intellectualism a 
further element is associated, namely, ritualism. If 
religion is presented as a complex system of tradi- 
tional doctrine, to which the few alone have any 
real access, the majority of believers cannot practise 



254 What is Christianity ? 

it at all except as ritual. Doctrine comes to be ad- 
ministered in stereotyped formulas accompanied by 
symbolic acts. Although no inner understanding 
of it is thus possible, it produces the feeling of 
something mysterious. The very deification which 
the future is expected to bring, and which in itself 
is something that can neither be described nor con- 
ceived, is now administered, as though it were 
an earnest of what is to come, by means of ritual 
acts. An imaginative mood is excited, and disposes 
to its reception; and this excitement, when en- 
hanced, is its seal. 

Such are the feelings which move the members of 
the Greek Catholic Church. Intercourse with God 
is achieved through the cult of a mystery, and by 
means of hundreds of efficacious formulas small and 
great, signs, pictures, and consecrated acts, which, 
if punctiliously and submissively observed, com- 
municate divine grace and prepare the Christian for 
eternal life. Doctrine, as such, is for the most part 
something unknown ; if it appears at all, it is only 
in the form of liturgical aphorisms. For ninety-nine 
per cent, of these Christians, religion exists only as 
a ceremonious ritual, in which it is externalised. 
But even for Christians of advanced intelligence all 
these ritual acts are absolutely necessary, for it is 
only in them that doctrine receives its correct appli- 
cation and obtains its due result. 



Greek Catholicism 255 

There is no sadder spectacle than this transforma- 
tion of the Christian religion from a worship of God 
in spirit and in truth into a worship of God 
in signs, formulas, and idols. To feel the whole 
pity of this development, we need not descend to 
such adherents of this form of Christendom as are 
religiously and intellectually in a state of complete 
abandonment, like the Copts and Abyssinians ; the 
Syrians, Greeks, and Russians are, taken as a whole, 
only a little better. Where, however, can we find 
in Jesus' message even a trace of any injunction 
that a man is to submit to solemn ceremonies as 
though they were mysterious ministrations, to be 
punctilious in observing a ritual, to put up pictures, 
and to mumble maxims and formulas in a prescribed 
fashion ? It was to destroy this sort of religion 
that Jesus Christ suffered himself to be nailed to the 
cross y and now we find it re-established under his 
name and authority ! Not only has ' ' mystagogy ' ' 
stepped into a position side by side with the " ma- 
thesis," that is to say, the doctrine, which called it 
forth ; but the truth is that " doctrine " — be its con- 
stitution what it may, it is still a spiritual principle 
— has disappeared, and ceremony dominates every- 
thing. This is what marks the relapse into the an- 
cient form of the lowest class of religion. Over the 
vast area of Greek and Oriental Christendom re- 
ligion has been almost stifled by ritualism. It is 



256 What is Christianity ? 

not that religion has sacrificed one of its essential 
elements. No ! it has entered an entirely different 
plane ; it has descended to the level where religion 
may be described as a cult and nothing but a cult. 

Nevertheless, Greek and Oriental Christianity 
contains within itself an element which for centuries 
has been capable of offering, and still offers here 
and there to-day, a certain resistance to the com- 
bined forces of traditionalism, intellectualism, and 
ritualism — I mean monasticism. To the question, 
Who is in the highest sense of the word Christian ? 
the Greek Christian replies : the monk. The man 
who practises silence and purity, who shuns not 
only the world but also the Church of the world ; 
who avoids not only false doctrine but any state- 
ment about the true ; who fasts, gives himself up to 
contemplation, and steadily waits for God's glorious 
light to dawn upon his gaze ; who attaches no value to 
anything but tranquillity and meditation on the 
Eternal; who asks nothing of life but death, and 
who from such utter unselfishness and purity makes 
mercy arise — this is the Christian. To him not even 
the Church and the consecration which it bestows is an 
absolute necessity. For such a man the whole system 
of sanctified secularity has vanished. Over and over 
again in ascetics of this kind the Church has seen in 
its ranks figures of such strength and delicacy of re- 



Greek Catholicism 257 

ligious feeling, so filled with the divine, so inwardly 
active in forming themselves after certain features 
of Christ's image, that we may, indeed, say, Here 
there is a living religion not unworthy of Christ's 
name. We Protestants must not take direct offence 
at the form of monasticism. The conditions under 
which our churches arose have made a harsh and 
one-sided opinion of it a kind of duty. And al- 
though for the present, and in view of the problems 
which press on us, we may be justified in retaining 
this opinion, we must not summarily apply it to 
other circumstances. Nothing but monasticism 
could provide a leaven and a counterpoise in that 
traditionalistic and ritualistic secular Church such 
as the Greek Church was and still is. Here there 
was freedom, independence, and vivid experience; 
here the truth that it is only what is experienced 
and comes from within that has any value in religion 
carried the day. 

And yet, the invaluable tension which in this 
part of Christendom existed between the secular 
Church and monasticism has unhappily almost dis- 
appeared, and of the blessing which it established 
there is scarcely a trace left. Not only has monas- 
ticism become subject to the Church and is every- 
where bent under its yoke, but the secular spirit 
has in a special degree invaded the monasteries. 
Greek and Oriental monks are now, as a rule, the 



258 What is Christianity ? 

instruments of the lowest and worst functions of the 
Church, of the worship of pictures and relics, of the 
crassest superstition and the most imbecile sorcery. 
Exceptions are not wanting, and it is still to the 
monks that we must pin our hopes of a better 
future ; but it is not easy to see how a Church is to 
be reformed which, teach what it will, is content 
with its adherents finding the Christian faith in the 
observance of certain ceremonies, and Christian 
morality in keeping fast-days correctly. 

As to our last question : What modifications did 
the Gospel undergo in this Church and how did it 
hold its own ? Well, in the first place, I do not ex- 
pect to be contradicted if I answer that this official 
ecclesiasticism with its priests and its cult, with all its 
vessels, saints, vestments, pictures, and amulets, with 
its ordinances of fasting and its festivals, has absol- 
utely nothing to do with the religion of Christ. It 
is the religion of the ancient world tacked on to cer- 
tain conceptions in the Gospel ; or, rather, it is the 
ancient religion with the Gospel absorbed into it. 
The religious moods which are here produced or 
which turn towards this kind of religion are, in so far 
as they can still be called religious at all, of a class 
lower than Christian. But neither have its tradition- 
alism and its " orthodoxy " much in common with 
the Gospel ; they, too, were not derived from it and 



Greek Catholicism 259 

cannot be traced back to it. Correct doctrine, re- 
verence, obedience, the shudderings of awe, may be 
valuable and edifying things; they may avail to 
bind and restrain the individual, especially when 
they draw him into the community of a stable so- 
ciety ; but they have nothing to do with the Gospel, 
as long as they fail to touch the individual at the 
point where freedom lies, and inner decision for or 
against God. In contrast with this, monasticism, 
in its resolve to serve God by an ascetic and con- 
templative life, contains an incomparably more 
valuable element, because sayings of Christ, even 
though applied in a one-sided and limited way, are 
nevertheless taken as a standard, and the possibility 
of an independent inner life being kindled is not so 
far removed. 

Not so far removed — entirely lacking, thank God, 
it is not, even in the waste shrines of this ecclesias- 
ticism, and Christ's sayings sound in the ear of any 
who visit its churches. On the Church as a Church, 
apparatus and all, there is nothing more favourable 
to be said than has been said already; the best 
thing about it is that it keeps up, although to a 
modest extent, the knowledge of the Gospel. Jesus' 
words, even though only mumbled by the priests, 
take the first place in this Church, too, and the quiet 
mission which they pursue is not suppressed. Side by 
side with the magical apparatus and the transports 



260 What is Christianity ? 

of feeling, of which the ceremony is only the 
caput mortuum, stand Jesus' sayings; they are read 
in private and in public, and no superstition avails to 
destroy their power. Nor can its fruits be mistaken 
by anyone who will look below the surface. Among 
these Christians, too, priests and laity, there are 
men who have come to know God as the Father of 
mercy and the leader of their lives, and who love 
Jesus Christ, not because they know him as the per- 
son with two natures, but because a ray of his being 
has shone from the Gospel into their hearts, and 
this ray has become light and warmth to their own 
lives. And although the idea of the fatherly pro- 
vidence of God more readily assumes an almost 
fatalistic form in the East, and produces too much 
quietism, it is certain that here, too, it endows men 
with strength and energy, unselfishness and love. I 
need only refer again to Tolstoi's Village Tales, 
which I have already quoted. The picture which 
they present is not artificial. But from much also 
that I have myself seen and experienced I can tes- 
tify how even with the Russian peasant or the 
humbler priests, in spite of all the saint- and pic- 
ture-worship, a power of simple trust in God is to 
be found, a delicacy of moral feeling, and an active 
brotherly love, which does not disclaim its origin 
in the Gospel. Where they exist, however, the en- 
tire ceremonial service of religion is capable of un- 



Greek Catholicism 261 

dergoing a spiritualisation, not by any " symbolical 
re-interpretation," — that is much too artificial a pro- 
cess, — but because, if only the soul is touched by 
the living God at all, thought can rise to him even 
by the help of an idol. 

But it is truly no accidental circumstance that, in 
so far as any independent religious life is to be 
found among the members of this Church, it at once 
takes shape in trust in God, in humility, in unself- 
ishness and mercy, and that Jesus Christ is at the 
same time laid hold of with reverence; for these are 
just the indications which show us that the Gospel 
is not as yet stifled, and that it is in these religious 
virtues that it has its real substance. 

As a whole and in its structure the system of the 
Oriental Churches is foreign to the Gospel ; it means 
at once a veritable transformation of the Christian 
faith and the depression of religion to a much lower 
level, namely, that of the ancient world. But in its 
monasticism, in so far as this is not entirely subject 
to the secular Church and itself secularised, there is 
an element which reduces the whole ecclesiastical 
apparatus to a secondary position, and which opens 
up the possibility of attaining a state of Christian 
independence. Above all, however, by not having 
suppressed the Gospel, but by having kept it acces- 
sible, even though in a meagre fashion, the Church 



262 What is Christianity ? 

still possesses the corrective in its midst. Side by 
side with the Church the Gospel exercises its own 
influence on individuals. This influence, however, 
takes shape in a type of religion exhibiting the very 
characteristics which we have shown to be most dis- 
tinctive of Jesus' message. Thus on the ground 
occupied by this Church the Gospel has not com- 
pletely perished. Here, too, human souls find a 
dependence on God and a freedom in Him, and 
when they have found these, they speak the lan- 
guage which every Christian understands, and 
which goes to every Christian's heart. 



LECTURE XIV 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN ROMAN CATHOLICISM 

THE Roman Church is the most comprehensive 
and the vastest, the most complicated and yet 
at the same time the most uniform structure which, 
as far as we know, history has produced. All the 
powers of the human mind and soul, and all the 
elemental forces at mankind's disposal, have had a 
hand in creating it. In its many-sided character 
and severe cohesion Roman Catholicism is far in 
advance of Greek. We ask, in turn : 

What did the Roman Catholic Church achieve ? 

What are its characteristics ? 

What modifications has the Gospel suffered in 
this Church, and how much of it has remained ? 

What did the Roman Catholic Church achieve ? 
Well, in the first place, it educated the Romano- 
Germanic nations, and educated them in a sense 
other than that in which the Eastern Church edu- 
cated the Greeks, Slavs, and Orientals. However 
much their original nature, or primitive and histori- 
cal circumstances, may have favoured those nations 
and helped to promote their rise, the value of the 

263 



264 What is Christianity ? 

services which the Church rendered is not thereby 
diminished. It brought Christian civilisation to 
young nations, and brought it, not once only, — so 
as to keep them at its first stage, — no! it gave them 
something which was capable of exercising a pro- 
gressive educational influence, and for a period of 
almost a thousand years it itself led the advance. 
Up to the fourteenth century it was a leader and a 
mother; it supplied the ideas, set the aims, and 
disengaged the forces. Up to the fourteenth cent- 
ury — thenceforward, as we may see, those whom it 
educated became independent, and struck out paths 
which it did not indicate, and on which it is neither 
willing nor able to follow them. But even so, 
however, during the period covered by the last six 
hundred years it has not fallen so far behind as the 
Greek Church. With comparatively brief interrup- 
tions it has proved itself fully a match for the whole 
movement of politics, — we in Germany know that 
well enough ! — and even in the movement of thought 
it still has an important share. The time, of course, 
is long past since it was a leader; on the contrary, 
it is now a drag ; but, in view of the mistaken and 
precipitate elements in modern progress, the drag 
which it supplies is not always the reverse of a 
blessing. 

In the second place, however, this Church upheld 
the idea of religious and ecclesiastical independence 



Roman Catholicism 265 

in Western Europe in the face of the tendencies, 
not lacking here either, towards State-omnipotence 
in the spiritual domain. In the Greek Church, as 
we saw, religion has become so intimately allied with 
nationality and the State that, public worship and 
monasticism apart, it has no room left for independ- 
ent action. On Western ground it is otherwise ; the 
religious element and the moral element bound up 
with it occupy an independent sphere and jealously 
guard it. This we owe in the main to the Roman 
Church. 

These two facts embrace the most important 
piece of work which this Church achieved and in 
part still achieves. We have already indicated the 
bounds which must be set to the first. To the 
second also a sensible limitation attaches, and we 
shall see what it is as we proceed. 

What are the characteristics of the Roman 
Church ? This was our second question. Unless 
I am mistaken, the Church, complicated as it is, 
may be resolved into three chief elements. The 
first, Catholicism, it shares with the Greek Church. 
The second is the Latin spirit and the Roman World- 
Empire continuing in the Roman Church. The 
third is the spirit and religious fervour of St. Au- 
gustine. So far as the inner life of this Church is 
religious life and religious thought, it follows the 



266 What is Christianity ? 

standard which St. Augustine authoritatively fixed. 
Not only has he arisen again and again in his many 
successors, but he has awakened and kindled num- 
bers of men who, coming forward with independent 
religious and theological fervour, are nevertheless 
spirit of his spirit. 

These three elements, the Catholic, the Latin in 
the sense of the Roman World -Empire, and the 
Augustinian, constitute the peculiar character of 
the Roman Church. 

So far as the first is concerned, you may recognise 
its importance by the fact that the Roman Church 
to-day receives every Greek Christian, nay, at once 
effects a " union " with every Greek ecclesiastical 
community, without more ado, as soon as the Pope 
is acknowledged and submission is made to his 
apostolic supremacy. Any other condition that 
may be exacted from the Greek Christians is of 
absolutely no moment; they are even allowed to 
retain divine worship in their mother tongue, and 
married priests. If we consider what a " purifica- 
tion " Protestants have to undergo before they can 
be received into the bosom of the Roman Church, 
the difference is obvious. Now a Church cannot 
make so great a mistake about itself as to omit any 
essential condition in taking up new members, 
especially if they come from another confession. 
The element which the Roman Church shares with 



Roman Catholicism 267 

the Greek must, then, be of significant and critical 
importance, when it is sufficient to make union pos- 
sible on the condition that the papal supremacy is 
recognised. As a matter of fact, the main points 
characteristic of Greek Catholicism are all to be 
found in Roman as well, and are, on occasion, just 
as energetically maintained here as they are there. 
Traditionalism, orthodoxy, and ritualism play just 
the same part here as they do there, so far as 
" higher considerations" do not step in; and the 
same is true of monasticism also. 

So far as " higher considerations " do not step in 
— here we have already passed to the examination 
of the second element, namely, the Latin spirit in 
the sense of the Roman World-dominion. In the 
Western half of Christendom the Latin spirit, the 
spirit of Rome, very soon effected certain distinct 
modifications in the general Catholic idea. As 
early as the beginning of the third century we see 
the thought emerging in the Latin Fathers that 
salvation, however effected and whatever its nature, 
is bestowed in the form of a contract under definite 
conditions, and only to the extent to which they 
are observed ; it is salus legitima ; in fixing these 
conditions the Deity manifested its mercy and in- 
dulgence, but it guards their observance all the 
more jealously. Further, the whole contents of 
revelation are lex, the Bible as well as tradition. 



268 What is Christianity ? 

Again, this tradition is attached to a class of officials 
and to their correct succession. The " mysteries," 
however, are " sacraments " ; that is to say, on the 
one hand, they are binding acts ; on the other, they 
contain definite gifts of grace in a carefully limited 
form and with a specific application. Again, the 
discipline of penance is a procedure laid down by 
law and akin to the process adopted in a civil action 
or a suit in defence of honour. Lastly, the Church 
is a legal institution ; and it is so, not side by side 
with its function of preserving and distributing sal- 
vation, but it is a legal institution for the sake of 
this very function. 

But it is in its constitution as a Church that it is 
a legal establishment. We must briefly see how 
things stand in regard to this constitution, as its 
foundations are common to the Eastern and the 
Western Church. When the monarchical episco- 
pate had developed, the Church began to approxi- 
mate its constitution to State government. The 
system of uniting sees under a metropolitan who 
was, as a rule, the bishop of the provincial capital, 
corresponded with the distribution of the Empire 
into provinces. Above and beyond this, the ecclesi- 
astical constitution in the East was developed a 
step further when it adapted itself to the division 
of the Empire introduced by Diocletian, by which 
large groups of provinces were united. Thus arose 



Roman Catholicism 269 

the constitution of the patriarchate, which was not, 
however, strictly enforced, and was in part counter- 
acted by other considerations. 

In the West no division into patriarchates came 
about; but, on the other hand, something else hap- 
pened: in the fifth century the Western Roman 
Empire perished of internal weakness and through 
the inroads of the barbarians. What was left of 
what was Roman took refuge in the Roman Church 
— civilisation, law, and orthodox faith as opposed 
to the Arian. The barbarian chiefs, however, did 
not venture to set themselves up as Roman Em- 
perors, and enter the vacant shrine of the imperium; 
they founded empires of their own in the provinces. 
In these circumstances the Bishop of Rome ap- 
peared as the guardian of the past and the shield of 
the future. All over the provinces occupied by the 
barbarians, even in those which had previously 
maintained a defiant independence in the face of 
Rome, bishops and laity looked to him. Whatever 
Roman elements the barbarians and Arians left 
standing in the provinces — and they were not few — 
were ecclesiasticised and at the same time put under 
the protection of the Bishop of Rome, who was the 
chief person there after the Emperor's disappear- 
ance. But in Rome the episcopal throne was occu- 
pied in the fifth century by men who understood 
the signs of the times and utilised them to the full. 



270 What is Christianity? 

The Roman Church in this way privily pushed itself 
into the place of the Roman World-Empire, of which 
it is the actual continuation ; the empire has not 
perished, but has only undergone a transformation. 
If we assert, and mean the assertion to hold good 
even of the present time, that the Roman Church 
is the old Roman Empire consecrated by the Gos- 
pel, that is no mere " clever remark," but the 
recognition of the true state of the matter historic- 
ally, and the most appropriate and fruitful way of 
describing the character of this Church. It still 
governs the nations ; its Popes rule like Trajan and 
Marcus Aurelius; Peter and Paul have taken the 
place of Romulus and Remus; the bishops and 
archbishops, of the proconsuls ; the troops of priests 
and monks correspond to the legions; the Jesuits, 
to the imperial body-guard. The continued influ- 
ence of the old Empire and its institutions may be 
traced in detail, down to individual legal ordinances, 
nay, even in the very clothes. That is no Church 
like the evangelical communities, or the national 
Churches of the East ; it is a political creation, and 
as imposing as a World-Empire, because the con- 
tinuation of the Roman Empire. The Pope, who 
calls himself" King" and " Pontifex Maximus," is 
Caesar's successor. The Church, which as early as 
the third and fourth century was entirely filled with 
the Roman spirit, has re-established in itself the 



Roman Catholicism 271 

Roman Empire. Nor have patriotic Catholics in 
Rome and Italy in every century from the seventh 
and eighth onwards understood the matter other- 
wise. When Gregory VII. entered upon the 
struggle with the imperial power, this is the way 
in which an Italian prelate fired his ardour: 

Seize the first Apostle's sword, 
Peter's glowing sword, and smite ! 

Scatter far the savage horde ; 

Break their wild, impetuous might ! 

Let them feel the yoke of yore, 

Let them bear it evermore ! 

What with blood in Marius' day, 

Marius and his soldiers brave, 
Or, by Julius' mighty sway, 

Romans did their land to save, 
Thou canst do by simple word. 
Great the Church's holy sword ! 

Rome made great again by thee 

Offers all thy meed of praise ; 
Not for Scipio's victory 

Did it louder paeans raise, 
Nor entwine the laurel crown 
For a deed of more renown. 

Who is it that is thus addressed, a bishop or a 
Caesar ? A Caesar, I imagine ; it was felt to be so 
then, and it is still felt to be so to-day. It is an 
Empire that this priestly Caesar rules, and to attack 
it with the armament of dogmatic polemics alone is 
to beat the air. 

I cannot here show what immense results follow 



272 What is Christianity? 

from the fact that the Catholic Church is the 
Roman Empire. Let me mention only a few con- 
clusions which the Church itself draws. It is just 
as essential to this Church to exercise governmental 
power as to proclaim the Gospel. The phrase 
" Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus trium- 
phat," must be understood in a political sense. He 
rules on earth by the fact that his Rome-directed 
Church rules, and rules, too, by law and by force ; 
that is to say, it employs all the means of which 
states avail themselves. Accordingly it recognises 
no form of religious fervour which does not first of 
all submit to this papal Church, is approved by it, 
and remains in constant dependence upon it. This 
Church, then, teaches its "subjects" to say: 
" Though I understand all mysteries, and though I 
have all faith, and though I bestow all my goods to 
feed the poor, and though I give my body to be 
burned, and have not unity in love, which alone 
floweth from unconditional obedience to the Church, 
it profiteth me nothing." Outside the pale of the 
Church, all faith, all love, all the virtues, even mar- 
tyrdoms, are of no value whatever. Naturally ; for 
even an earthly state appreciates only those services 
which a man has rendered for its sake. But here 
the state identifies itself with the kingdom of 
Heaven, in other respects proceeding just like Other 
states. From this fact you can yourselves deduce 



Roman Catholicism 273 

all the Church's claims; they follow without diffi- 
culty. Even the most exorbitant demand appears 
quite natural as soon as you only admit the truth of 
the two leading propositions: " The Roman Church 
is the kingdom of God," and, " The Church must 
govern like an earthly state." It is not to be de- 
nied that Christian motives have also had a hand in 
this development : the desire to bring the Christian 
religion into a real connexion with life, and to make 
its influence felt in every situation that may arise, 
as well as anxiety for the salvation of individuals 
and of nations. How many earnest Catholic Christ- 
ians there have been who had no other real desire 
than to establish Christ's rule on earth and build up 
his kingdom ! But while there can be no doubt that 
their intention, and the energy with which they put 
their hands to the work, made them superior to the 
Greeks, there can be as little that it is a serious mis- 
understanding of Christ's and the apostles' injunc- 
tions to aim at establishing and building up the 
kingdom of God by political means. The only 
forces which this kingdom knows are religious and 
moral forces, and it rests on a basis of freedom. But 
when a church comes forward with the claims of an 
earthly state, it is bound to make use of all the 
means at the disposal of that state, including, there- 
fore, crafty diplomacy and force; for the earthly 

state, even a state governed by law, must on occasion 
18 



274 What is Christianity? 

become a state that acts contrary to law. The 
course of development which this Church has fol- 
lowed as an earthly state was, then, bound to lead 
logically to the absolute monarchy of the Pope and 
his infallibility ; for in an earthly theocracy infalli- 
bility means, at bottom, nothing more than full 
sovereignty means in a secular state. That the 
Church has not shrunk from drawing this last con- 
clusion is a proof of the extent to which the sacred 
element in it has become secularised. 

That this second element was bound to produce a 
radical change in the characteristic features of 
Catholicism in Western Europe, in its traditional- 
ism, its orthodoxy, its ritualism, and its monastic- 
ism, is obvious. Traditionalism holds the same 
position after the change as it did before ; but when 
any element in it has become inconvenient, it is 
dropped and its place taken by the papal will. " La 
tradition, c'est moi " as Pius IX. is reported to 
have said. Further, "sound doctrine" is still a 
leading principle, but, as a matter of fact, it can be 
altered by the ecclesiastical policy of the Pope; 
subtle distinctions have given many a dogma a new 
meaning. New dogmas, too, are promulgated. In 
many respects doctrine has become more arbitrary, 
and a rigid formula in a matter of dogma may be set 
aside by a contrary injunction in a matter of ethics 
and in the confessional. The hard and fast lines of 



Roman Catholicism 275 

the past can be everywhere relaxed in favour of the 
needs of the present. The same holds good of ritu- 
alism, as also of monasticism. The extent to which 
the old monasticism has been altered, by no means 
always to its disadvantage alone, and has even in 
some important aspects been transformed into its 
flat opposite, I cannot here show. In its organisa- 
tion this Church possesses a faculty of adapting itself 
to the course of history such as no other Church pos- 
sesses; it always remains the same old Church, or 
seems to do so, and is always becoming a new one. 

The third element determining the character of 
the spirit prevalent in the Church is opposed to that 
which we have just discussed, and yet has held its 
own side by side with the second : it goes by the 
names of Augustine and Augustinianism. In the 
fifth century, at the very time when the Church was 
setting itself to acquire the inheritance of the Ro- 
man Empire, it came into possession of a religious 
genius of extraordinary depth and power, accepted 
his ideas and feelings, and up to the present day 
has been unable to get rid of them. That the 
Church became at one and the same time Caesarian 
and Augustinian is the most important and marvel- 
lous fact in its history. What kind of a spirit, how- 
ever, and what kind of a tendency, did it receive 
from Augustine ? 



276 What is Christianity? 

Well, in the first place, Augustine's theology and 
his religious fervour denote a special resuscitation of 
the Pauline experience and doctrine of sin and 
grace, of guilt and justification, of divine predestina- 
tion and human servitude. In the centuries that 
had elapsed since the apostle's day this experience 
and the doctrine embodying it had been lost, but 
Augustine went through the same inner experiences 
as Paul, gave them the same sort of expression, and 
clothed them in definite conceptions. There was no 
question here of mere imitation ; the individual dif- 
ferences between the two cases are of the utmost 
importance, especially in the way in which the doc- 
trine of justification is conceived. With Augustine, 
it was represented as a constant process, continuing 
until love and all the virtues completely filled the 
heart ; but, as with Paul, it is all a matter of indi- 
vidual experience and inner life. If you read Au- 
gustine's Confessions you will acknowledge that in 
spite of all the rhetoric — and rhetoric there is — it is 
the work of a genius who has felt God, the God of 
the Spirit, to be the be-all and the end-all of his life ; 
who thirsts after Him and desires nothing beside 
Him. Further, all the sad and terrible experiences 
which he had had in his own person, all the rupture 
with himself, all the service of transient things, the 
" crumbling away into the world bit by bit," and 
the egoism for which he had to pay in loss of 



Roman Catholicism 277 

strength and freedom, he reduces to the one root, 
sin ; that is to say, lack of communion with God, 
godlessness. Again, what released him from the 
entanglements of the world, from selfishness and in- 
ner decay, and gave him strength, freedom, and a 
consciousness of the Eternal, he calls, with Paul, 
grace. With him he feels, too, that grace is wholly 
the work of God, but that it is obtained through 
and by Christ, and possessed as forgiveness of sins 
and as the spirit of love. He is much less free and 
more beset with scruples in his view of sin than the 
great apostle ; and it is this which gives his religious 
language and everything that proceeded from him 
quite a peculiar colour. " Forgetting those things 
which are behind, and reaching forth unto those 
things which are before " — the apostolic maxim is 
not Augustine's. Consolation for the misery of sin 
— this is the complexion of his entire Christianity. 
Only rarely was he capable of soaring to the sense 
of the glorious liberty of the children of God; and, 
where he was so capable, he could not testify to it 
in the same way as Paul. But he could express the 
sense of consolation for the misery of sin with a 
strength of feeling and in words of an overwhelming 
force such as no one before him ever displayed ; nay, 
more : he has managed by what he has written to go 
so straight to the souls of millions, to describe so 
precisely their inner condition, and so impressively 



27% What is Christianity? 

and overpoweringly to put the consolation be- 
fore them, that what he felt has been felt again 
and again for fifteen hundred years. Up to the day 
in which we live, so far as Catholic Christians are 
concerned, inward and vivid religious fervour, and 
the expression which it takes, are in their whole 
character Augustinian. It is by what he felt that 
they are kindled, and it is his thoughts that they 
think. Nor is it otherwise with many Protestants, 
and those not of the worst kind. This juxtaposition 
of sin and grace, this interconnexion of feeling and 
doctrine, seems to possess an indestructible power 
which no lapse of time is able to touch; this feel- 
ing of mixed pain and bliss is an unforgettable pos- 
session with those who have once experienced it; 
and even though they may have subsequently eman- 
cipated themselves from religion it remains for them 
a sacred memory. 

The Western Church opened, and was compelled 
to open, its doors to this Augustine at the very 
moment when it was preparing to enter upon its do- 
minion. It was defenceless in face of him ; it had 
so little of any real value to offer from its immedi- 
ate past that it weakly capitulated. Thus arose 
the astonishing " complexio oppositorum " which 
we see in Western Catholicism : the Church of rites, 
of law, of politics, of world-dominion, and the 
Church in which a highly individual, delicate, sub- 



Roman Catholicism 279 

limated sense and doctrine of sin and grace is 
brought into play. The external and the internal 
elements are supposed to unite ! To speak frankly, 
this has been impossible from the beginning ; inter- 
nal tension and conflict were bound to arise at once; 
the history of Western Catholicism is full of it. Up 
to a certain point, however, these antitheses admit 
of being reconciled ; they admit of it at least so far 
as the same men are concerned. That is proved by 
no less a person than Augustine himself, who, in 
addition to his other characteristics, was also a 
staunch Churchman ; nay, who in such matters as 
power and prestige promoted the external interests 
of the Church, and its equipment as a whole, with 
the greatest energy. I cannot here explain how he 
managed to accomplish this work, but that there 
could be no lack of internal contradictions in it is 
obvious. Only let us be clear about two facts: 
firstly, that the outward Church is more and more 
forcing the inward Augustinianism into the back- 
ground, and transforming and modifying it, with- 
out, however, being able wholly to destroy it ; 
secondly, that all the great personalities who have 
continued to kindle religious fervour afresh in the 
Western Church, and to purify and deepen it, have 
directly or indirectly proceeded from Augustine and 
formed themselves on him. The long chain of 
Catholic reformers, from Agobard and Claudius of 



280 What is Christianity ? 

Turin in the ninth century down to the Jansenists 
in the seventeenth and eighteenth, and beyond 
them, is Augustinian. And if the Council of Trent 
may be in many respects rightly called a Council of 
Reform ; if the doctrine of penance and grace was 
formulated then with much more depth and inward- 
ness than could be expected from the state of 
Catholic theology in the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries, that is only owing to the continued influ- 
ence of Augustine. With the doctrine of grace, 
taken from Augustine, the Church has, indeed, 
associated a practice of the confessional which 
threatens to make that doctrine absolutely ineffect- 
ive. But, however far it may stretch its bounds so 
as to keep all those within its pale who do not re- 
volt against its authority, it after all not only toler- 
ates such as take the same view of sin and grace as 
Augustine, but it also desires that, wherever possi- 
ble, everyone may feel as strongly as he the gravity 
of sin and the blessedness of belonging to God. 

Such are the essential elements of Roman 
Catholicism. There is much else that might be 
mentioned, but what has been said denotes the 
leading points. 

We pass to the last question : What modifications 
has the Gospel here undergone, and how much of it 
is left ? Well, — this is not a matter that needs many 



Roman Catholicism 281 

words, — the whole outward and visible institution of 
a Church claiming divine dignity has no foundation 
whatever in the Gospel. It is a case, not of distor- 
tion, but of total perversion. Religion has here 
strayed away in a direction that is not its own. As 
Eastern Catholicism may in many respects be more 
appropriately regarded as part of the history of 
Greek religion than of the history of the Gospel, so 
Roman Catholicism must be regarded as part of the 
history of the Roman World-Empire. To contend, 
as it does, that Christ founded a kingdom ; that this 
kingdom is the Roman Church ; that he equipped it 
with a sword, nay, with two swords, a spiritual and 
a temporal, is to secularise the Gospel ; nor can this 
contention be sustained by appealing to the idea 
that Christ's spirit ought certainly to bear rule 
amongst mankind. The Gospel says, " Christ's 
kingdom is not of this world," but the Church has 
set up an earthly kingdom ; Christ demands that his 
ministers shall not rule but serve, but here the 
priests govern the world ; Christ leads his disciples 
away from political and ceremonious religion and 
places every man face to face with God — God and 
the soul, the soul and its God, but here, on the con- 
trary, man is bound to an earthly institution with 
chains that cannot be broken, and he must obey ; it 
is only when he obeys that he approaches God. 
There was a time when Roman Christians shed their 



282 What is Christianity ? 

blood because they refused to do worship to Caesar, 
and rejected religion of the political kind; to-day 
they do not, indeed, actually pray to an earthly 
ruler, but they have subjected their souls to the 
despotic orders of the Roman papal king. 



LECTURE XV 

THE point to which we referred at the close of 
the last lecture was that, as an outward and 
visible church and a state founded on law and on 
force, Roman Catholicism has nothing to do with 
the Gospel, nay, is in fundamental contradiction 
with it. That this state has borrowed a divine 
lustre from the Gospel, and finds this lustre extra- 
ordinarily advantageous, cannot avail to upset the 
verdict. To mix the divine with the secular, and 
what is innermost in a man with a political element, 
is to work the greatest of mischiefs, because the 
conscience is thereby enslaved and religion robbed 
of its solemn character. It is inevitable that this 
character should be lost when every possible meas- 
ure which serves to maintain the earthly empire of 
the Church — for example, the sovereignty of the 
Pope — is proclaimed as the divine will. We are re- 
minded, however, that it is just this independent 
action on the part of the Church which saves re- 
ligion in Western Europe from entirely degenerat- 
ing into nationality, or the state, or police. The 
Church, it is urged, has maintained intact the high 

283 



284 What is Christianity ? 

idea of the complete self-subsistence of religion and 
its independence of the state. We may admit the 
claim, but the price which Western Europe has had 
to pay for this service, and still pays, is much too 
great ; by having to pay so heavy a tribute, the na- 
tions are threatened with bankruptcy within ; and, 
as for the Church, the capital which it has amassed 
is truly a capital that consumes. With all the ap- 
parent increase in its power, a pauperising process 
is slowly being accomplished in the Church ; slowly 
but surely. Let me here digress from our subject 
for a moment. 

No one who looks at the present political situa- 
tion can have any ground for asserting that the 
power of the Roman Church is on the wane. What 
a growth it has experienced in the nineteenth cent- 
ury ! And yet — any one with a keen eye sees that 
the Church is far from possessing now such a pleni- 
tude of power as it enjoyed in the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries, when all the material and spiritual 
forces available were at its disposal. Since that 
epoch its power has, in point of intensity, suffered 
an enormous decline, arrested by a few brief out- 
bursts of enthusiasm between 1540 and 1620, and in 
the nineteenth century. Earnest Catholics, con- 
cerned at this fact, make no secret of it ; they know 
and admit that an important portion of the spiritual 
possessions necessary to the dominion of the Church 



Roman Catholicism 285 

has been lost to it. And again : what is the posi- 
tion of the Latin nations which, when all is said, 
form the proper province of the Roman Church's 
rule ? There is only one of them which can really 
be called a great Power, and what sort of spectacle 
will it present in another generation ? As a state 
this Church lives to-day, to a not inconsiderable ex- 
tent, on its history, its old Roman and mediaeval 
history; — and it lives as the Roman Empire of the 
Romans. But empires do not live for ever. Will 
the Church be capable of maintaining itself in the 
great changes to come ? Will it bear the increasing 
tension between it and the intellectual life of the 
people ? Will it survive the decline of the Latin 
nations ? 

But let us leave this question to answer itself. 
Let us recollect, rather, that this Church, thanks 
above all to its Augustinianism, possesses in its 
orders of monkhood and its religious societies a deep 
element of life in its midst. In all ages it has pro- 
duced saints, so far as men can be so called, and it 
still produces them to-day. Trust in God, unaf- 
fected humility, the assurance of redemption, the de- 
votion of one's life to the service of one's brethren, 
are to be found in it; many brethren take up the 
cross of Christ and exercise at one and the same 
time that self-judgment and that joy in God which 
Paul and Augustine achieved. The Imitatio Christi 



286 What is Christianity ? 

kindles independent religious life, and a fire which 
burns with a flame of its own. Ecclesiasticism has 
not availed to suppress the power of the Gospel, 
which, in spite of the frightful weight that it has to 
carry, makes its way again and again. It still works 
like leaven, nor can we fail to see that this Church, 
side by side with a lax morality for which it has 
often enough been to blame, has, by the mouth of 
its great mediaeval theologians, fruitfully applied 
the Gospel to many circumstances of life and 
created a Christian ethics. Here and elsewhere it 
has proved that it not only carries, as it were, the 
thought of the Gospel with it as a river carries 
grains of gold, but that they are bound up with it 
and have been further developed in it. The infalli- 
ble Pope, the " Apostolico-Roman polytheism," 
the veneration of the saints, blind obedience, and 
apathetic devotion — these things seem to have 
stifled all inwardness, and yet there are Christians 
still to be found in this Church, too, of the kind 
which the Gospel has awakened, earnest and loving, 
filled with joy and peace in God. Lastly, the mis- 
chief is not that the Gospel has been bound up with 
political forms at all, — Melanchthon was no traitor 
when he expressed his willingness to acknowledge 
the Pope if he would permit the Gospel to be 
preached in its purity, — but it lies in the sanctifica- 
tion of the political element, and in the inability of 



Protestantism 287 

this Church to get rid of what was once of service 
in particular historical circumstances, but has now 
become an obstruction and a clog. 

We now pass to the last section in the exposition 
of our subject. 

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN PROTESTANTISM 

Anyone who looks at the external condition of 
Protestantism, especially in Germany, may, at first 
sight, well exclaim : " What a miserable spectacle ! " 
But no one can survey the history of Europe from 
the second century to the present time without be- 
ing forced to the conclusion that in the whole course 
of this history the greatest movement and the one 
most pregnant with good was the Reformation in 
the sixteenth century ; even the great change which 
took place at the transition to the nineteenth is 
inferior to it in importance. What do all our dis- 
coveries and inventions and our advances in outward 
civilisation signify in comparison with the fact that 
to-day there are thirty millions of Germans, and 
many more millions of Christians outside Germany, 
who possess a religion without priests, without 
sacrifices, without " fragments" of grace, without 
ceremonies — a spiritual religion ! 

Protestantism must be understood, first and fore- 
most, by the contrast which it offers to Catholicism, 
and here there is a double direction which any 



288 What is Christianity ? 

estimate of it must take, first as Reformation and sec- 
ondly as Revolution. It was a reformation in regard 
to the doctrine of salvation ; a revolution in regard 
to the Church, its authority, and its apparatus. 
Hence Protestantism is no spontaneous phenom- 
enon, created as it were by a "generatio equivoca" ; 
but, as its very name implies, it was called into be- 
ing by the misdeeds of the Roman Church having 
become intolerable. It was the close of a long 
series of cognate but ineffectual attempts at reform 
in the Middle Ages. If the position which it thus 
holds in history proves its continuity with the past, 
the fact is still more strongly in evidence in its own 
and not inappropriate contention that it was not an 
innovation in regard to religion, but a restoration 
and renewal of it. But from the point of view of 
the Church and its authority Protestantism was un- 
doubtedly a revolutionary phenomenon. We must, 
then, take account of it in both these relations. 

Protestantism was a Reformation, that is to say, a 
renewal, as regards the core of the matter, as re- 
gards religion, and consequently as regards the doc- 
trine of salvation. That may be shown in the main 
in three points. 

In the first place, religion was here brought back 
again to itself, in so far as the Gospel and the cor- 
responding religious experience were put into the 
foreground and freed of all alien accretions. Re- 



Protestantism 289 

ligion was taken out of the vast and monstrous fab- 
ric which had been previously called by its name — 
a fabric embracing the Gospel and holy water, the 
priesthood of all believers and the Pope on his 
throne, Christ the Redeemer and St. Anne — and 
was reduced to its essential factors, to the Word of 
God and to faith. This truth was imposed as a 
criterion on everything that also claimed to be " re- 
ligion " and to unite on terms of equality with those 
great factors. In the history of religions every 
really important reformation is always, first and 
foremost, a critical reduction to principles; for, in 
the course of its historical development, religion, by 
adapting itself to circumstances, attracts to itself 
much alien matter, and produces, in conjunction 
with this, a number of hybrid and apocryphal ele- 
ments, which it is necessarily compelled to place 
under the protection of what is sacred. If it is not 
to run wild from exuberance, or be choked by its 
own dry leaves, the reformer must come who puri- 
fies it and brings it back to itself. This critical re- 
duction to principles Luther accomplished in the 
sixteenth century, by victoriously declaring that 
the Christian religion was given only in the Word of 
God and in the inward experience which accords 
with this Word, -f 

In the second place, there was the definite way in 
which the " Word of God " and the " experience " 



290 What is Christian' 

of it were grasped. For Luther tl nd " did 

not mean Church doctrine; it did en mean 

the Bible ; it meant the message of tl % grace of 

God in Christ which makes guilty espairing 

men happy and blessed ; and the " exj . ace " was 
just the certainty of this grace. In e sense in 
which Luther took them, both can be embraced in 
one phrase : the confident belief in a God of grace. 
They put an end — such was his own experience, and 
such was what he taught — to all inner discord in a 
man ; they overcome the burden of every ill ; they 
destroy the sense of guilt; and, despite the imper- 
fection of a man's own acts, they give him the cert- 
ainty of being inseparably united with the holy 
God: 

Now I know and believe 

And give praise without end 
That God the Almighty 

Is Father and Friend, 
And that in all troubles, 

Whatever betide, 
He hushes the tempest 

And stands at my side. 

Nothing, he taught, is to be preached but the 
God of grace, with whom we are reconciled through 
Christ. Conversely, it is not a question of ecstasies 
and visions ; no transports of feeling are necessary ; 
it is faith that is to be aroused. Faith is to be the 
beginning, middle, and end of all religious fervour. 
In the correspondence of Word and faith " justifl- 



Protestantism 291 

cation" is experienced, and hence justification 
holds the chief place in the Reformers' message ; it 
means nothing less than the attainment of peace 
and freedom in God through Christ, dominion over 
the world, and an eternity within. 

Lastly, the third feature of this renewal was the 
great transformation which God 's worship now in- 
evitably underwent, God's worship by the individ- 
ual and by the community. Such worship — this 
was obvious — can and ought to be nothing but put- 
ting faith to practical proof. As Luther declared 
over and over again, " All that God asks of us is 
faith, and it is through faith alone that He is willing 
to treat with us." To let God be God, and to pay 
Him honour by acknowledging and invoking Him as 
Father — it is thus alone that a man can serve Him. 
Every other path on which a man tries to approach 
Him and honour Him leads astray, and vain is the 
attempt to establish any other relation with Him. 
What an enormous mass of anxious, hopeful, and 
hopeless effort was now done away with, and what 
a revolution in worship was effected ! But all that 
is true of God's worship by the individual is true in 
exactly the same way of public worship. Here, too, 
it is only the Word of God and prayer which have 
any place. All else is to be banished; the com- 
munity assembled for God's worship is to proclaim 
the message of God with praise and thanksgiving, 



292 What is Christianity ? 

and call upon His name. Anything that goes be- 
yond this is not worship at all. 

These three points embrace the chief elements in 
the Reformation. What they involved was a re- 
newal of religion; for not only do they denote, 
albeit in a fashion of their own, a return to Christ- 
ianity as it originally was, but they also existed 
themselves in Western Catholicism, although buried 
in a heap of rubbish. 

But, before we go further, permit me two brief 
digressions. We were just saying that the com- 
munity assembled for God's worship must not sol- 
emnise its worship in any other way than by 
proclaiming the Word and by prayer. To this, 
however, we must add, according to the Reformers' 
injunctions, that all that is to stamp this commun- 
ity as a Church is its existence as a community of 
the faith in which God's Word is preached aright. 
Here we may leave the sacraments out of account, 
as, according to Luther, they, too, derive their en- 
tire importance from the Word. But if Word and 
faith are the only characteristics of worship, it looks 
as if those who contend that the Reformation did 
away with the visible Church and put an invisible 
one in its place were right. But the contention does 
not tally with the facts. The distinction between 
a visible and an invisible Church dates back as far 
as the Middle Ages, or even, from one point of 



Protestantism 293 

view, as far as Augustine. Those who defined the 
true Church as " the number of the predestined" 
were obliged to maintain that it was wholly invisi- 
ble. But the German Reformers did not so define 
it. In declaring the Church to be a community of 
the faith in which God's Word is preached aright, 
they rejected all the coarser characteristics of a 
Church, and certainly excluded the visibility that 
appeals to the senses; but — to take an illustration 
— who would say that an intellectual community, 
for example, a band of young men all alike eagerly 
devoted to knowledge or the interests of their coun- 
try, was " invisible," because it possesses no ex- 
ternal characteristics, and cannot be counted on 
one's fingers ? Just as little is the evangelical 
Church an " invisible " community. It is a com- 
munity of the spirit, and therefore its " visibility" 
takes different phases and different degrees of 
strength. There are phases of it where it is ab- 
solutely unrecognisable, and others, again, where it 
stands forth with the energy of a power that appeals 
to the senses. It can never, indeed, take the sharp 
contours of a state like the Venetian republic or the 
kingdom of France, — such was the comparison which 
a great exponent of Catholic dogmatics declared 
to be applicable to his Church, — but as Protestants 
we ought to know that we belong, not to an " in- 
visible " Church, but to a spiritual community 



294 What is Christianity ? 

which disposes of the forces pertaining to spiritual 
communities; a spiritual community resting on 
earth, but reaching to the Eternal. 

And now as to the other point: Protestantism 
maintains that, objectively, the Christian commun- 
ity is based upon the Gospel alone, but that the 
Gospel is contained in Holy Scripture. From the 
very beginning it has encountered the objection 
that, if that be so, and at the same time there be 
no recognised authority to decide what the purport 
and meaning of the Gospel is and how it is to be as- 
certained from the Scriptures, general confusion will 
be the result ; that of this confusion the history of 
Protestantism affords ample testimony; that if 
every man has a warrant to decide what the " true 
understanding " of the Gospel is, and in this respect 
is bound to no tradition, no council, and no pope, 
but exercises the free right of research, any unity, 
community, or Church is absolutely impossible; 
that the state, therefore, must interfere, or some 
arbitrary limit be fixed. That no Church possess- 
ing the Sacred Office of the Inquisition can arise in 
this way is certainly true ; further, that to impose 
any external limits on a community from the inside 
is a simple impossibility. What has been done by 
the state or under pressure of historical necessities 
does not affect the question at all ; the structures 
which have arisen in this way are, in the evangelical 



Protestantism 295 

sense, only figuratively called " Churches." Pro- 
testantism reckons — this is the solution — upon the 
Gospel being something so simple, so divine, and there- 
fore so truly human, as to be most certain of being un- 
derstood when it is left entirely free, and also as to 
produce essentially the same experiences and convic- 
tions in individual souls. In this it may often 
enough make mistakes ; differences of individuality 
and education may issue in very heterogeneous re- 
sults; but still, in this its attitude, it has not up to 
now been put to shame. A real, spiritual com- 
munity of evangelical Christians; a common con- 
viction as to what is most important and as to its 
application to life in all its forms, has arisen and is 
in full force and vigour. This community embraces 
Protestants in and outside Germany, Lutherans, 
Calvinists, and adherents of other denominations. 
In all of them, so far as they are earnest Christians, 
there lives a common element, and this element is 
of infinitely greater importance and value than all 
their differences. It keeps us to the Gospel and it 
protects us from modern heathenism and from re- 
lapse into Catholicism. More than this we do not 
need ; nay, any other fetter we reject. This, how- 
ever, is no fetter, but the condition of our freedom. 
And when we are reproached with our divisions and 
told that Protestantism has as many doctrines as 
heads, we reply: " So it has, but we do not wish it 



296 What is Christianity ? 

otherwise ; on the contrary, we want still more free- 
dom, still greater individuality in utterance and in 
doctrine; the historical circumstances necessitating 
the formation of national and free churches have 
imposed only too many rules and limitations upon 
us, even though they be not proclaimed as divine 
ordinances; we want still more confidence in the 
inner strength and unifying power of the Gospel, 
which is more certain to prevail in free conflict than 
under guardianship ; we want to be a spiritual realm 
and we have no desire to return to the fleshpots of 
Egypt ; we are well aware that in the interests of 
order and instruction outward and visible commun- 
ities must arise ; we are ready to foster their growth, 
so far as they fulfil these aims and deserve to be 
fostered ; but we do not hang our hearts upon them, 
for they may exist to-day and to-morrow give place, 
under other political or social conditions, to new or- 
ganisations; let anyone who has such a Church have 
it as though he had it not ; our Church is not the 
particular Church in which we are placed, but the 
' societas fidei ' which has its members everywhere, 
even among Greeks and Romans." That is the 
evangelical answer to the reproach that we are 
" divided," and that is the language which the lib- 
erty that has been given to us employs. Let us 
now return from these digressions to the exposition 
of the essential features of Protestantism. 



Protestantism 297 

Protestantism was not only a Reformation but 
also a Revolution, From the legal point of view 
the whole Church system against which Luther re- 
volted could lay claim to full obedience. It had 
just as much legal validity in Western Europe as 
the laws of the state themselves. When Luther 
burnt the papal bull he undoubtedly performed a 
revolutionary act — revolutionary, not in the bad 
sense of a revolt against legal ordinance which is 
also moral ordinance as well, but certainly in the 
sense of a violent breach with a given legal condi- 
tion. It was against this state of things that the 
new movement was directed, and it was to the fol- 
lowing chief points that its protest in word and deed 
extended. Firstly : It protested against the entire 
hierarchical and priestly system in the Church, de- 
manded that it should be abolished, and abolished 
it in favour of a common priesthood and an estab- > 1 
lished order formed on the basis of the congreg^Jx 
tion. What a range this demand had, and to what 
an extent it interfered with the previously existing 
state of things, cannot be told in a few sentences. 
To explain it all would take hours. Nor can we 
here show how the various arrangements actually 
took shape in the evangelical Churches. That is not 
a matter of fundamental importance, but what is of 
fundamental importance is that the " divine " rights 
of the Church were abolished. 



298 What is Christianity ? 

Secondly : It protested against all formal, exter- 
nal authority in religion; against the authority, 
therefore, of councils, priests, and the whole tradi- 
tion of the Church. That alone is to be authority 
which shows itself to be such within and effects a 
deliverance; the thing itself, therefore, the Gospel. 
Thus Luther also protested against the authority of 
the letter of the Bible ; but we shall see that this 
was a point on which neither he nor the rest of the 
Reformers were quite clear, and where they failed 
to draw the conclusions which their insight into 
fundamentals demanded. 

Thirdly: It protested against all the traditional 
arrangements for public worship, all ritualism, and 
every sort of " holy work." As it neither knows 
nor tolerates, as we have seen, any specific form of 
worship, any material sacrifice and service to God, 
any mass and any works done for God and with a 
view to salvation, the whole traditional system of 
public worship, with its pomp, its holy and semi- 
holy articles, its gestures and processions, came to 
the ground. How much could be retained in the 
way of form for cesthetic or educational reasons was, 
in comparison with this, a question of entirely sec- 
ondary importance. 

Fourthly: It protested against sacramentalism. 
Baptism and the Lord's Supper it left standing, as 
institutions of the primitive Church, or, as it might 



Protestantism 299 

be, of the Lord himself; but it desired that they 
should be regarded either as symbols and marks by 
which the Christian is known, or as acts deriving 
their value exclusively from that message of the 
forgiveness of sins which is bound up with them. 
All other sacraments it abolished, and with them 
the whole notion of God's grace and help being ac- 
cessible in bits, and fused in some mysterious way 
with definite corporeal things. To sacramentalism 
it opposed the Word ; and to the notion that grace 
was given by bits, the conviction that there is only 
one grace, namely, to possess God Himself as the 
source of grace. It was not because Luther was so 
very enlightened that in his tract " On the Babylon- 
ian Captivity " he rejected the whole system of 
sacramentalism, — he had enough superstition left in 
him to enable him to advance some very shocking 
contentions, — but because he had had inner experi- 
ence of the fact that where " grace " does not en- 
dow the soul with the living God Himself it is an 
illusion. Hence for him the whole doctrine of sacra- 
mentalism was an infringement of God's majesty 
and an enslavement of the soul. 

Fifthly : It protested against the double form of 
morality, and accordingly against the higher form ; 
against the contention that it is particularly well- 
pleasing to God to make no use of the powers and 
gifts which are part of creation. The Reformers 



300 What is Christianity ? 

had a strong sense of the fact that the world passes 
away with the lusts thereof; we must certainly not 
represent Luther as the modern man cheerfully 
standing with his feet firmly planted on the earth ; 
on the contrary, like the men of the Middle Ages, 
he had a strong yearning to be rid of this world and 
to depart from the '■ vale of tears." But because 
he was convinced that we neither can nor ought to 
offer God anything but trust in Him, he arrived, in 
regard to the Christian's position in the world, at 
quite different theses from those which were ad- 
vanced by the grave monks of previous centuries. 
As fastings and ascetic practices had no value be- 
fore God, and were of no advantage to one's fellow- 
men, and as God is the Creator of all things, the 
most useful thing that a man can do is to remain in 
the position in which God has placed him. This 
conviction gave Luther a cheerful and confident 
view of earthly ordinances, which contrasts with, 
and actually got the upper hand of, his inclination 
to turn his back upon the world. 

He advanced the definite thesis that all positions 
in life — constituted authority, the married state, 
and so on, down to domestic service — existed by 
the will of God, and were therefore genuinely spirit- 
ual positions in which we are to serve God ; a faith- 
ful maid-servant stands higher, with him, than a 
contemplative monk. Christians are not to be al- 



Protestantism 3 ox 

ways devising how they may find some new paths 
of their own, but to show patience and love of 
neighbour within the sphere of their given vocation. 
Out of this there grew up in his mind the notion 
that all worldly laws and spheres of activity have 
an independent title. It is not that they are to be 
merely tolerated, and have no right to exist until 
they receive it from the Church. No! they have 
rights of their own, and they form the vast domain 
in which the Christian is to give proof of his faith 
and love; nay, they are even to be respected in 
places which are as yet ignorant of God's revelation 
in the Gospel. 

It was thus that the same man who asked nothing 
of the world, so far as his own personal feelings 
were concerned, and whose soul was troubled only 
by thought for the Eternal, delivered mankind from 
the ban of asceticism. He was thereby really and 
truly the life and origin of a new epoch, and he 
gave it back a simple and unconstrained attitude 
towards the world, and a good conscience in all 
earthly labour. This fruitful work fell to his share, 
not because he secularised religion, but because he 
took it so seriously and so profoundly that, while in 
his view it was to pervade all things, it was itself to 
be freed from everything external to it. 



LECTURE XVI 

THE question has often been raised whether, and 
to what extent, the Reformation was a work 
of the German spirit. I cannot here go into this 
complicated problem. But this much seems to me 
to be certain, that while we cannot, indeed, connect 
Luther's momentous religious experiences with his 
nationality, the results positive as well as negative 
with which he invested them display the German — 
the German man and German history. From the 
time that the Germans endeavoured to make them- 
selves really at home in the religion handed down 
to them — this did not take place until the thirteenth 
century onwards — they were preparing the way for 
the Reformation. And just as Eastern Christianity 
is rightly called Greek, and the Christianity of the 
Middle Ages and of Western Europe is rightly 
called Roman, so the Christianity of the Reforma- 
tion maybe described as German, in spite of Calvin. 
For Calvin was Luther's pupil, and he made his in- 
fluence most lastingly felt, not among the Latin 
nations but among the English, the Scotch, and the 
Dutch. Through the Reformation the Germans 

302 



Protestantism 303 

mark a stage in the history of the Universal Church. 
No similar statement can be made of the Slavs. 

The recoil from asceticism, which as an ideal 
never penetrated the Germans to the same extent as 
other nations, and the protest against religion as ex- 
ternal authority, are to be set down as well to the 
Pauline Gospel as to the German spirit. Luther's 
warmth and heartiness in preaching, and his frank- 
ness in polemical utterance, were felt by the Ger- 
man nation to be an opening out of its own soul. 

In the previous lecture we touched upon the chief 
provinces in which Luther raised an emphatic and 
still effective protest. There is much upon which I 
could also dwell : for example, upon the opposition 
which, especially at the commencement of his 
reforming activity, he offered to the whole termino- 
logy of dogmatics, its formulae and doctrinal utter- 
ances. To sum up : he protested, because his aim 
was to restore the Christian religion in its purity, 
without priests and sacrifices, without external au- 
thorities and ordinances, without solemn ceremo- 
nies, without all the chains with which the Beyond 
was to be bound to the Here. In its revising ardour 
the Reformation went back not only earlier than 
the eleventh century, not only earlier than the 
fourth or the second, but to the very beginnings of 
religion. Nay, without being aware of it, the 



304 What is Christianity ? 

Reformation even modified or entirely put aside 
forms which existed even in the apostolic age : thus 
in matters of discipline it abolished fasting; in mat- 
ters of constitution it abolished bishops and deacons; 
in matters of doctrine it abolished, among other 
things, Chiliasm. 

But with the change effected by Reformation 
and Revolution, how does the new creation stand as 
a whole in regard to the Gospel ? We may say that 
in the four leading points which we emphasised in 
the previous lecture — inwardness and spirituality, 
the fundamental thought of the God of grace, His 
worship in spirit and in truth, and the idea of the 
Church as a community of faith — the Gospel was in 
reality re-won. Need I prove this in detail, or are 
we to be shaken in our conviction because, as is 
surely the case, a Christian in the sixteenth and in 
the nineteenth century presents an appearance dif- 
ferent from that which a Christian presented in the 
first ? That the inwardness and individualism which 
the Reformation disengaged accord with the char- 
acter of the Gospel is certain. Further, Luther's 
pronouncement on justification not only reflects in 
the main, and in spite of certain irreducible differ- 
ences, Paul's train of thought, but is also, in point 
of aim, in exact correspondence with Jesus' teach- 
ing. To know God as one's Father, to possess a 



Protestantism 3°5 

God of grace, to find comfort in His grace and 
providence, to believe in the forgiveness of sins — in 
both cases that is the point on which everything 
turns. And in the troubled times of Lutheran 
orthodoxy a Paul Gerhardt succeeded in giving such 
grand expression to this fundamental conviction of 
the Gospel in his hymns, " Is God for me, then let 
all," and *' Commit thy ways," as to convince us 
how truly Protestantism was penetrated with it. 
Again, that the right worship of God ought to be 
nothing but the acknowledgment of God in praise 
and prayer, but that the love of neighbour is also 
worship, is taken direct from the Gospel and Paul's 
corresponding injunctions. Lastly, that the true 
Church is held together by the Holy Ghost and by 
faith ; that it is a spiritual community of brothers 
and sisters, is a conviction which is in line with the 
Gospel, and was most clearly expressed by Paul. 
In so far as the Reformation restored all this, and 
also recognised Christ as the only Redeemer, it 
may in the strictest sense of the word be called 
evangelical ; and in so far as these convictions, crip- 
pled and burdened though they may be, retain their 
ascendency in the Protestant Churches, they have 
every warrant for being so described. 

But what was here achieved had its dark side as 
well. If we ask what the Reformation cost us, and 



306 What is Christianity ? 

to what extent it made its principles prevail, we 
shall see this dark side very clearly. 

We get nothing from history without paying for 
it, and for a violent movement we have to pay 
double. What did the Reformation cost us ? I 
will not speak of the fact that the unity of Western 
civilisation was destroyed, since it was, after all, only 
over a part of Western Europe that the Reform- 
ation prevailed, for the freedom and many-sided 
character of the resulting development brought us a 
greater gain. But the necessity of establishing the 
new Churches as State-Churches was attended by 
serious disadvantages. The system of an ecclesi- 
astical state is, of course, worse, and its adherents 
have truly no cause to praise it in contrast with the 
State-Churches. But still the latter — which are 
not solely the outcome of the breach with ecclesi- 
astical authority, but were already prepared for in 
the fifteenth century — have been the cause of much 
stunted growth. They have weakened the feeling 
of responsibility, and diminished the activity, of 
the evangelical communities; and, in addition, they 
have aroused the not unfounded suspicion that the 
Church is an institution set up by the state, and 
accordingly to be adjusted to the state. Much has 
happened, indeed, in the last few decades to check 
that suspicion by the greater independence which the 
Churches have obtained ; but further progress in 



Protestantism 3°7 

this direction is necessary, especially in regard to 
the freedom of individual communities. The con- 
nexion with the state must not be violently severed, 
for the Churches have derived much advantage from 
it ; but steps must be taken to further the develop- 
ment upon which we have entered. If this results 
in multifarious organisations in the Church, it will 
do no harm ; on the contrary, it will remind us, in a 
forcible way, that these forms are all arbitrary. 

Further, Protestantism was forced by its opposi- 
tion to Catholicism to lay exclusive emphasis on 
the inward character of religion, and upon " faith 
alone " ; but to formulate one doctrine in sharp op- 
position to another is always a dangerous process. 
The man in the street is not sorry to hear that 
" good works " are unnecessary, nay, that they con- 
stitute a danger to the soul. Although Luther is 
not responsible for the convenient misunderstanding 
that ensued, the inevitable result was that in the 
reformed Churches in Germany from the very start 
there were accusations of moral laxity and a want of 
serious purpose in the sanctification of life. The 
saying, " If ye love me, keep my commandments," 
was unwarrantably thrust into the background. Not 
until the Pietistic movement arose was its central 
importance once more recognised. Up till then the 
pendulum of the conduct of life took a suspicious 
swing in the contrary direction, out of opposition to 



308 What is Christianity ? 

the Catholic " justification by works." But religion 
is not only a state of the heart ; it is a deed as well ; 
it is faith active in love and in the sanctification of 
life. This is a truth with which evangelical Christ- 
ians must become much better acquainted, if they 
are not to be put to shame. 

There is another point closely connected with 
what I have just mentioned. The Reformation 
abolished monasticism, and was bound to abolish it. 
It rightly affirmed that to take a vow of lifelong 
asceticism was a piece of presumption ; and it rightly 
considered that any worldly vocation, conscien- 
tiously followed, in the sight of God was equal to, 
nay, was better than, being a monk. But some- 
thing now happened which Luther neither foresaw 
nor desired: "monasticism," of the kind that is 
conceivable and necessary in the evangelical sense 
of the word, disappeared altogether. But every 
community stands in need of personalities living 
exclusively for its ends. The Church, for instance, 
needs volunteers who will abandon every other pur- 
suit, renounce " the world," and devote themselves 
entirely to the service of their neighbour; not be- 
cause such a vocation is M a higher one," but be- 
cause it is a necessary one, and because no Church 
can live without also giving rise to this desire. 
But in the evangelical Churches the desire has 
been checked by the decided attitude which they 



Protestantism 309 

have been compelled to adopt towards Catholicism. 
It is a high price that we have paid ; nor can the 
price be reduced by considering, on the other hand, 
how much simple and unaffected religious fervour 
has been kindled in home and family life. We may 
rejoice, however, that in the past century a begin- 
ning has been made in the direction of recouping 
this loss. In the institution of deaconesses and 
many cognate phenomena the evangelical Churches 
are getting back what they once ejected through 
their inability to recognise it in the form which it 
then took. But it must undergo a much ampler 
and more varied development. 

Not only Had the Reformation to pay a high 
price ; it was also incapable of perceiving all the con- 
clusions to which its new ideas led, and of giving 
them pure effect. It is not that the work which it 
did was not absolutely valid and permanent in every 
particular — how could that be, and who could desire 
it to have been so ? No ! it remained stationary in 
its development even at the point at which, to 
judge by the earnest foundation that was laid at 
the start, higher things might have been expected. 
Various causes combined to produce this result. 
From the year 1526 onwards national Churches had 
to be founded at headlong speed on evangelical 
lines; they were forced to be " rounded and com- 
plete" at a time when much was still in a state of 



3io What is Christianity? 

flux. Then again, a mistrust of the left wing, of 
the " enthusiasts," induced the Churches to offer 
an energetic resistance to tendencies which they 
could have accompanied for a good bit of their way. 
Luther's unwillingness to have anything to do with 
them, nay, the manner in which he became sus- 
picious of his own ideas when they coincided with 
those of the " enthusiasts," was bitterly avenged 
and came home to the evangelical Churches in the 
Age of Enlightenment. Even at the risk of being 
reckoned among Luther's detractors, we must go 
further. This genius had a faith as robust as Paul's, 
and thereby an immense power over the minds and 
hearts of men ; but he was not abreast of the know- 
ledge accessible even in his own time. The naive 
age had gone by ; it was an age of deep feeling, of 
progress, an age in which religion could not avoid 
contact with all the powers of mind. In this age it 
was his destiny to be forced to be not only a re- 
former but also an intellectual and spiritual leader 
and teacher. The way of looking at the world and 
at history he had to plan afresh for generations ; for 
there was no one there to help him, and to no one 
else would people listen. But he had not all the re- 
sources of clear knowledge at his command. Lastly, 
he was always anxious to go back to the original, 
to the Gospel itself, and, so far as it was possible to 
do it by intuition and inward experience, he did it ; 



Protestantism 3 11 

moreover, he made some admirable studies in his- 
tory, and in many places broke victoriously through 
the serried lines of the traditional dogmas. But any 
trustworthy knowledge of the history of those dog- 
mas was as yet an impossibility, and still less was 
any historical acquaintance with the New Testament 
and primitive Christianity attainable. It is marvel- 
lous how, in spite of all this, Luther possessed so 
much power of penetration and sound judgment. 
We have only to look at his introductions to the 
books of the New Testament, or at his treatise on 
" Churches and Councils." But there were count- 
less problems of which he did not even know, to say 
nothing of being able to solve them ; and so it was 
that he had no means of distinguishing between 
kernel and husk, between what was original and 
what was of alien growth. How can we be sur- 
prised, then, if in its doctrine, and in the view which 
it took of history, the Reformation was far from be- 
ing a finished product; and that, where it perceived 
no problems, confusion in its own ideas was inevita- 
ble ? It could not, like Pallas Athene, spring com- 
plete from Jupiter's head; as doctrine it could do 
no more than mark a beginning, and it had to reckon 
on future development. But by being rapidly 
formed into national Churches it came near to itself 
cutting short its further development for all time. 
As regards the confusion and the checks which it 



312 What is Christianity? 

brought upon itself, we must content ourselves with 
referring to a few leading points. Firstly, Luther 
would admit nothing but the Gospel, nothing but 
what frees and binds the consciences of men, what 
everyone, down to the man-servant and the maid- 
servant, can understand. But then he not only took 
the old dogmas of the Trinity and the two natures as 
part of the Gospel — he was not in a position to ex- 
amine them historically — and even framed new ones, 
but he was absolutely incapable of making any sound 
distinction between " doctrine " and Gospel; in this 
respect falling far behind Paul. The necessary re- 
sult was that intellectualism was still in the ascend- 
ant ; that a scholastic doctrine was again set up as 
necessary to salvation ; and that two classes of 
Christians once more arose : those who understand 
the doctrine, and the minors who are dependent on 
the others' understanding of it. 

Secondly, Luther was convinced that that alone 
is the " Word of God " whereby a man is inwardly 
born anew — the message of the free grace of God in 
Christ. At the highest levels to which he attained 
in his life he was free from every sort of bondage to 
the letter. What a capacity he had for distinguish- 
ing between law and Gospel, between Old and New 
Testament, nay, for distinguishing in the New 
Testament itself ! All that he would recognise was 
the kernel of the matter, clearly revealed as it is in 



Protestantism 313 

these books, and proving its power by its effect on 
the soul. But he did not make a clean sweep. In 
cases where he had found the letter important, he 
demanded submission to the " it is written " ; and 
he demanded it peremptorily, without recollecting 
that, where other sayings of the Scriptures were 
concerned, he himself had declared the "it is writ- 
ten " to be of no binding force. 

Thirdly, grace is the forgiveness of sins, and 
therefore the assurance of possessing a God of grace, 
and life, and salvation. How often Luther repeated 
this, always with the addition that what was effica- 
cious here was the Word — that union of the soul 
with God in the trust and childlike reverence which 
God's Word inspires; it was a personal relation 
which was here involved. But the same man al- 
lowed himself to be inveigled into the most painful 
controversies about the means of grace, about com- 
munion and infant baptism. These were struggles 
in which he ran the risk of again exchanging his 
high conception of grace for the Catholic concep- 
tion, as well as of sacrificing the fundamental idea 
that it is a purely spiritual possession that is in 
question, and that, compared with Word and faith, 
all else is of no importance. What he here be- 
queathed to his Church has become a legacy of woe. 

Fourthly, the counter-Church which, as was in- 
evitable, rapidly arose in opposition to the Roman 



3H What is Christianity? 

Church, and, under the pressure which that Church 
exercised, perceived, not without reason, that its 
truth and its title lay in the re-establishment of the 
Gospel. But whilst the counter-Church privily 
identified the sum and substance of its doctrine with 
the Gospel, the thought also stole in surreptitiously : 
We — that is to say, the particular Churches which 
had now sprung up — are the true Church. Luther, 
of course, was never able to forget that the true 
Church was the sacred community of the faithful ; 
but still he had no clear ideas as to the relation be- 
tween it and the visible new Church which had now 
arisen, and subsequent generations settled down 
more and more into the sad misunderstanding: We 
are the true Church because we have the right "doc- 
trine." This misunderstanding, besides giving rise 
to evil results in self-infatuation and intolerance, 
still further strengthened that mischievous distinc- 
tion between theologians and clergy on the one 
side, and the laity on the other, on which we have 
already dwelt. Not, perhaps, in theory, but cer- 
tainly in practice, a double form of Christianity 
arose, just as in Catholicism ; and in spite of the 
efforts of the Pietistic movement it still remains 
with us to-day. The theologian and the clergy- 
man must defend the whole doctrine, and be ortho- 
dox : for the layman it suffices if he adheres to 
certain leading points and refrains from attacking 



Protestantism 315 

the orthodox creed. A very well-known man, as I 
have been lately told, expressed the wish that a 
certain inconvenient theologian would go over to 
the philosophical faculty; " for then/' he said, 
11 instead of an unbelieving theologian we should 
have a believing philosopher.' ' Here we have the 
logical outcome of the contention that in the evan- 
gelical Churches, too, doctrine is something laid 
down for all time, and that in spite of being gener- 
ally binding it is a matter of so much difficulty that 
the laity need not be expected to defend it. But 
if we persist on this path, and other confusions be- 
come worse confounded and take firmer root, there 
is a risk of Protestantism becoming a sorry double 
of Catholicism. I say a sorry double, because there 
are two things which Protestantism will never ob- 
tain, namely, a pope and monastic priests. Neither 
the letter of the Bible nor any belief embodied in 
creeds can ever produce the unconditional authority 
which Catholics possess in the Pope ; and Protest- 
antism cannot now return to the monastic priest. 
It retains its national Churches and its married 
clergy, neither of which looks very stately by the 
side of Catholicism, if competition with Catholicism 
is what the evangelical Churches desire. 

Gentlemen, Protestantism is not yet, thank God, 
in such a bad way that the imperfections and con- 
fusions in which it began have got the upper hand 



316 What is Christianity ? 

and entirely stunted or stifled its true character. 
Even those among us who are convinced that the 
Reformation in the sixteenth century is something 
that is over and done with are by no means ready 
to abandon the momentous ideas on which it was 
based, and there is a large field in which all earnest 
evangelical Christians are in complete unanimity. 
But if those who think that the Reformation is 
done with cannot see that its continuance in the 
sense of a pure understanding of God's Word is a 
question of life and death for Protestantism — its 
continuance has already borne abundant fruit in as- 
sociations like the Evangelical Union — let them at 
least promote the liberty for which Luther fought 
in his best days: " Let the minds of men rush one 
against another and strike ; if some are meanwhile 
led astray — well! that is what we must expect in 
war; where there is battle and slaughter, some 
must fall and be wounded, but whoso fights honestly 
will receive the crown." 

The reason why the catholicising of the Protest- 
ant Churches — I do not mean that they are becom- 
ing papal ; I mean that they are becoming Churches 
of ordinance, doctrine, and ceremony — is so burning 
a question is that three powerful forces are working 
together to further this development. First there 
is the indifference of the masses. The tendency of 
all indifference is to put religion on the same plane 



Protestantism 317 

not only with authority and tradition, but also with 
priests, hierarchies, and the cult of ceremonies. It 
puts religion there, and then goes on to complain of 
the external character and stationary condition of 
religion, and of the " pretensions " of the clergy; 
nay, it is capable, apparently, at one and the same 
moment, of mingling those complaints with abuse, 
of contemptuously jeering at every active expres- 
sion of religious feeling, and doing homage to every 
kind of ceremony. This kind of indifference has 
no understanding whatever for evangelical Christ- 
ianity, instinctively tries to suppress it, and praises 
Catholicism at its expense. The second of the 
forces to be taken into consideration is what I may 
call " natural religion." Those who live by fear 
and hope ; whose chief endeavour is to find some 
authority in matters of religion ; who are eager to 
be rid of their own responsibility and want to be 
reassured ; who are looking for some " adjunct " to 
life, whether in its solemn hours or in its worst dis- 
tress, some aesthetic transfiguration, or some violent 
form of assistance till time itself assists — all these 
people are also, without being aware of it, putting 
religion on the Catholic plane; they want " some- 
thing that they can lean upon," and a good deal 
else, too — all kinds of things to stir them up and 
help them ; but they do not want the Christianity 
of the Gospel. But the Christianity of the Gospel 



3i8 What is Christianity? 

in yielding to such demands becomes Catholic 
Christianity. The third force I mention unwill- 
ingly, and yet I cannot pass it over in silence ; it is 
the State. We must not blame the state for setting 
chief store by the conservative influence which re- 
ligion and the Churches exercise, and the subsidiary 
effects which they produce in respect of reverence, 
obedience, and public order. But this is just the 
reason why the state exercises pressure in this 
direction, protects all the elements of stability in 
the Churches, and seeks to keep them from every 
inner movement that would call their unity and 
their "public utility" in question; nay, it has 
tried often enough to approximate the Church to 
the police, and employ it as a means of maintaining 
order in the state. We can pardon this — let the 
state take the means of power wherever it can 
find them ; but the Church must not allow itself to 
be made into a pliant instrument ; for, side by side 
with all the desolating consequences to its vocation 
and prestige, it would thereby become an outward 
institution in which public order is of greater conse- 
quence than the spirit, form more important than 
matter, and obedience of higher value than truth. 

In the face of these three so different forces, 
what we have to do is to maintain Christian earnest- 
ness and liberty as presented in the Gospel. Theo- 
logy alone is unavailing; what is wanted is firmness 



Protestantism 3 J 9 

of Christian character. The evangelical Churches 
will be pushed into the background if they do not 
make a stand. It was out of such free creations as 
the Pauline communities were that the Catholic 
Church once arose. Who can guarantee that those 
Churches, too, will not become " Catholic" which 
had their origin in " the liberty of a Christian 
man " ? 

That, however, would not involve the destruction 
of the Gospel: so much, at least, history proves. 
It would be still traceable, like a red thread in the 
centre of the web, and somewhere or other it would 
emerge afresh, and free itself from its entangling 
connexions. Even in the outwardly decorated but 
inwardly decayed temples of the Greek and Roman 
Churches it has not been effaced. " Venture on- 
wards! deep down in a vault you will still find 
the altar and its sacred, ever-burning lamp ! " This 
Gospel, associated as it was with the speculative 
ideas and the mystery-worship of the Greeks, yet 
did not perish in them ; united with the Roman 
Empire, it held its own even in this fusion, nay, out 
of it gave birth to the Reformation. Its dogmatic 
doctrines, its ordinances of public worship, have 
changed; nay, what is much more, it has been em- 
braced by the simplest and purest minds and by the 
greatest thinkers ; it endeared itself to a St. Francis 
and to a Newton. It has outlived all the changing 



320 What is Christianity ? 

philosophies of the world ; it has cast off like a gar- 
ment forms and ideas which were once sacred ; it 
has participated in the entire progress of civilisa- 
tion ; it has become spiritualised, and in the course 
of history it has learnt how to make a surer appli- 
cation of its ethical principles. In its original 
earnestness and in the consolation which it offers, 
it has come home to thousands in all ages ; and in 
all ages, too, it has thrown off all its encumbrances, 
and broken down all barriers. If we were right in 
saying that the Gospel is the knowledge and recog- 
nition of God as the Father, the certainty of re- 
demption, humility and joy in God, energy and 
brotherly love ; if it is essential to this religion that 
the founder must not be forgotten over his message, 
nor the message over the founder, history shows us 
that the Gospel has, in point of fact, remained in 
force, struggling again and again to the surface. 

You will perhaps have felt that I have not 
entered into present questions, the relation, namely, 
of the Gospel to our present intellectual condition, 
our whole knowledge of the world, and our task 
therein. But to do this with any success in regard 
to the actual situation of affairs would require 
longer than a few fleeting hours. As regards the 
kernel of the matter, however, I have said all that 
is needful, for no new phase in the history of the 



Religion 3 21 

Christian religion has occurred since the Reform- 
ation. Our knowledge of the world has undergone 
enormous changes — every century since the Re- 
formation marks an advance, the most important 
being those in the last two ; but, looked at from a 
religious and ethical point of view, the forces and 
principles of the Reformation have not been outrun 
or rendered obsolete. We need only grasp them in 
their purity and courageously apply them, modern 
ideas will not put any new difficulties in their way. 
The real difficulties in the way of the religion of the 
Gospel remain the old ones. In face of them we 
can " prove" nothing, for our proofs are only varia- 
tions of our convictions. But the course which 
history has taken has surely opened up a wide pro- 
vince, in which the Christian sense of brotherhood 
must give practical proof of itself quite otherwise 
than it knew how, or was able, to do in the early 
centuries — I mean the social province. Here a 
tremendous task confronts us, and in the measure 
in which we accomplish it shall we be able to answer 
with a better heart the deepest of all questions — the 
question of the meaning of life. 

Gentlemen, it is religion, the love of God and 
neighbour, which gives life a meaning; knowledge 
cannot do it. Let me, if you please, speak of my 
own experience, as one who for thirty years has 



322 What is Christianity? 

taken an earnest interest in these things. Pure 
knowledge is a glorious thing, and woe to the man 
who holds it light or blunts his sense for it ! But 
to the question, Whence, whither, and to what pur- 
pose? it gives an answer to-day as little as it did two 
or three thousand years ago. It does, indeed, in- 
struct us in facts ; it detects inconsistencies ; it links 
phenomena ; it corrects the deceptions of sense and 
idea. But where and how the curve of the world 
and the curve of our own life begin, — that curve of 
which it shows us only a section, — and whither this 
curve leads, knowledge does not tell us. But if with 
a steady will we affirm the forces and the standards 
which on the summits of our inner life shine out as 
our highest good, nay, as our real self; if we are 
earnest and courageous enough to accept them as the 
great Reality and direct our lives by them ; and if we 
then look at the course of mankind's history, follow 
its upward development, and search, in strenuous 
and patient service, for the communion of minds in 
it, we shall not faint in weariness and despair, but 
become certain of God, of the God whom Jesus 
Christ called his Father, and who is also our 
Father. 

THE END. 



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